Disturbances and safety analysis of linear adaptive cruise control for cut-in scenarios: A theoretical framework

Although adaptive cruise control (ACC) has been widely analyzed in the car-following process, the way it reacts to cut-in maneuvers has been largely ignored. The cut-in maneuvers may trigger multiple disturbances to traffic, resulting in traffic oscillations and corresponding rear-end crashes. Hence, this study provides a theoretical analysis framework to model the disturbance evolution for ACC under cut-in scenarios. Specifically, we first derive the general ACC dynamic evolution based on the widely adopted ACC (i.e., linear feedback control) by applying CaleyHamilton theorem. Given that, two representative cut-in scenarios are designed to comprehensively understand the impact of cut-in vehicle behavior as well as control parameters on the safety and stability of the ACC system. Enable by the interpretability nature of ACC dynamic analytical solution, necessary and sufficient conditions for overshoot and potential safety risks are derived. The proposed framework is further applied to analyze the cut-in disturbance evolution of commercial ACC systems using field-test data and calibrated control parameters, by which the probabilistic safety and stability condition is provided. Through the above efforts, the framework is instrumental in robust ACC design under cut-in scenarios.