This paper describes the evaluation methodology for the Intelligent Cruise Control (ICC) Field Operational Test (FOT). The primary purpose of the evaluation is to assess safety impacts of the ICC system. Other benefits, such as convenience and comfort, as well as impacts of the system, e.g., fuel consumption and emissions, are also being assessed.
The ICC system incorporates a forward looking sensor and a headway controller with a conventional cruise control system, to automatically maintain a headway (with accelerator and downshift control inputs) between the ICC-equipped vehicle and a vehicle that precedes the equipped vehicle. The FOT will collect daily usage experiences from up to 162 lay drivers, each of whom will drive one of 10 ICC equipped vehicles for periods of 2 or 5 weeks. Data collection is scheduled to last 12 months. Each of the 10 vehicles has a data collection system that will support the evaluation. The data collection system will collect video data and a variety of vehicle performance measures.
Six evaluation goals have been identified. These include the evaluation of system benefits to users, system performance, institutional and legal issues, user acceptance, system costs, and ICC impacts on the transportation system. This paper focuses on the safety evaluation process, describing the safety objectives, hypotheses to be tested, measures of effectiveness, measures of performance, data sources and analysis methods.