Investigating the Longitudinal Impact of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Vehicle Degradation Under Communication Interruption

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), which is recognized as an extension of adaptive cruise control (ACC) through the addition of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, is promoted for application in the near future. Nevertheless, V2V communication is unreliable due to the communication interruption caused by cyberattacks and information congestion. When communication interruption occurs, a CACC vehicle cannot receive the travel information of the preceding vehicle and automatically degrades to an ACC vehicle, leading to the instability of the CACC fleet. This research aims to investigate the longitudinal impact of CACC vehicle degradation under communication interruption. The realistic CACC model and ACC model are used for constructing simulation experiments with a fleet of 10 CACC vehicles. By simulating multiple driving, degradation, and communication-interruption scenarios, we investigate the impact of CACC degradation on fleet stability, energy consumption, and exhaust emissions. Finally, we conduct sensitivity analysis on the key factors of driving models and simulation scenarios. The result shows that CACC vehicle degradation, especially the successive degradation of adjacent vehicles under the acceleration scenario, would reduce average travel speed and increase energy consumption and exhaust emissions. The findings highlight some key scenarios for actively monitoring communication interruption and provide some prospective actions to reduce the impact of CACC degradation.