11/19/2021
By Sokny Long

The Francis College of Engineering, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation defense by Tienan Li on “Studies of Adaptive Cruise Control Vehicles Based on Empirical Data.”

Ph.D. Candidate: Tienan Li
Defense Date: Friday, Dec. 3, 2021
Time: 2 to 3:30 p.m. EST
Location: This will be a virtual defense via Zoom. Those interested in attending should contact the student, Tienan_li@student.uml.edu, and committee advisor, Danjue_Chen@uml.edu, at least 24 hours prior to the defense to request access to the meeting.

Committee Chair (Advisor): Danjue Chen, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Committee Members:

  • Yuanchang Xie, Associate Professor, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Chronis Stamatiadis, Associate Professor, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Tingjian Ge, Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Zuduo Zheng, Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Queensland

Brief Abstract:

Emerging automated vehicle technologies are increasingly being deployed around the world and it is only a matter of time before the transportation landscape changes dramatically. Unfortunately, those changes cannot be well predicted due to the lack of empirical data. But adaptive cruise control (ACC) vehicles are common in the market and can be used to fill this gap. This dissertation aims to characterize the empirical car-following behaviors of commercial ACC systems and understand how ACC behaves in different conditions and the underlying impact mechanism. The behaviors of a single ACC and a three-vehicle ACC platoon in oscillatory traffic are investigated with data collected from a set of controlled empirical experiments. This dissertation further presents a comprehensive empirical study on the ACC equilibrium behaviors via the resulting fundamental diagrams from microscopic car-following data. The equilibrium behaviors among a large ACC pool are presented and compared to human-driven vehicles. Finally, this dissertation focuses on the non-equilibrium feature of ACC vehicles, including the hysteresis and shock wave speed. The hysteresis and shock wave based on the empirical data using three different ACC systems are measured. The behavioral features are found varied among the ACC systems and present both similarities and differences compared to human-driven vehicles.

All interested students and faculty members are invited to attend the online defense via remote access.