Architecture and Design of a Multi-Layered Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control System

Today's automotive transportation problems, mainly the poor efficiency of traffic and safety issues, are caused by the lack of collaboration between actors on the road. Those problems could be solved by helping drivers collaborate to make better decisions. The use of inter-vehicle communication could enable drivers to obtain more information about their local environment and about the intentions of other vehicles and thus could promote and enhance collaboration on the road. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) systems extend current work in vehicle control with communication and offer a promising solution centered on vehicle interactions. Still, due to the important number of possible interactions that need to be addressed, the design of a complete CACC system is a complex problem. As a solution, we present a CACC system based on a multi-layered architecture and centered on inter-vehicle communications. We will detail, in this paper, the architecture and the design of our modules. We will also assess their performance using simulation to show that our solution offers interesting possibilites and conclude by suggesting possible applications.