The impact and potential of cooperative and automated driving for intelligent traffic signal corridors: A field-operational-test and simulation experiment

A Field-Operational-Test (FOT) with CACC vehicles and wireless communication with intelligent intersections on arterial roads was performed in autumn 2018, initiated by the Province of Noord-Holland in The Netherlands. The goal of the pilot was to demonstrate the feasibility of CACC platooning and V2I/I2V (infrastructure-to-vehicle) communication and investigate the potential effects on traffic flow and safety in such an urban environment. During the pilot, seven CACC-enabled vehicles traversed a provincial road corridor, crossing five intelligent intersections, sending Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) and receiving time-to-green information from Intelligent Traffic Signals (iTS). A simulation model was calibrated using the data from the pilot to give indications of the potential future effects of CACC and I2V communication. The results showed that full CACC penetration can lead to 5% lower travel times on average with an enhanced improvement when intelligent intersections with V2I/I2V technology is applied (11% lower). If scaled up to the provincial road network, this could lead to a reduction of 12% in the total experienced delay for road users. As for previous tests on motorways, a reduction in effectiveness was also found for lower CACC- penetration rates with penetration rates of 10% no longer showing any substantial gains.