Empirical Approach to Evaluating Safety of Vehicle-Platooning Behavior

This paper numerically attempted to evaluate characteristics of vehicle-platooning safety in relation to vehicle reaction time and initial spacing. An empirical car-following simulations of seven passenger cars was employed to evaluate safety level of platooned vehicle at approximately 55-60km/h speed with 0.4-0.5G deceleration of the most-front vehicle in the platoon. Numerous simulation trials with varying delay time and initial spading found that there are some car-following situations where safety of vehicle platooning suddenly and sensitively deteriorates even with tiny changes of vehicle reaction time and initial spacing. This situation occurred at normal driving situations where we frequently observe in a real-world traffic.