The influence of (cooperative) adaptive cruise control (CACC/ACC) on rear-end crashes have been conducted by some previous studies. However, they usually did not consider the degeneration from stable CACC to unstable ACC when vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is not available. California PATH program validated the instability of ACC system by using real experimental data, which might have negative impacts on safety. Therefore, this paper evaluated the impacts of degeneration of CACC vehicles on rear-end crash risks. A micro-simulation based method was adopted to evaluate rear-end crash risks with the increase of the CACC market penetration rate (MPR). The results obtained were quite different from those in previous studies and showed that the rear-end crash risks of the full MDV flow increase before CACC MPR increases to a certain level. It was found that the instability of ACC vehicles might be the main factor for the negative results. The results of this paper provide helpful insight into the management of CACC vehicular flow in the V2V communication environment. INDEX TERMS Rear-end crash risks, cooperative adaptive cruise control, adaptive cruise control, surrogate safety measure, car-following model.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.