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This paper describes the safety evaluation results from a Field Operational Test (FOT) of an Intelligent Cruise Control (ICC) system. The primary goal of this evaluation was to determine safety effects of the ICC system. Safety surrogate measures were established and examined for normal driving situations as well as for safety–critical situations. It was found that use of the ICC system in the FOT was generally associated with safer driving compared to manual control and is projected to result in net safety benefits if widely deployed.

This paper describes the concept of using state space boundaries to evaluate the safety effects of longitudinal collision avoidance systems from data produced in field operational tests. The boundaries are represented in terms of the relative range and range rate between a lead vehicle and the vehicle hosting the collision avoidance system. Phase plane diagrams are used to illustrate the state space boundaries. Parameters of curves representing the boundaries were selected such that the boundaries would be fairly well distributed over the range vs. range-rate space with the ones closer to the horizontal axis (range = 0) being indicative of a relatively higher hazard potential. The application of these state space boundaries is examined with data available from a recently completed field operational test sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

This paper describes the evaluation methodology for the Intelligent Cruise Control (ICC) Field Operational Test (FOT). The primary purpose of the evaluation is to assess safety impacts of the ICC system. Other benefits, such as convenience and comfort, as well as impacts of the system, e.g., fuel consumption and emissions, are also being assessed. The ICC system incorporates a forward looking sensor and a headway controller with a conventional cruise control system, to automatically maintain a headway (with accelerator and downshift control inputs) between the ICC-equipped vehicle and a vehicle that precedes the equipped vehicle. The FOT will collect daily usage experiences from up to 162 lay drivers, each of whom will drive one of 10 ICC equipped vehicles for periods of 2 or 5 weeks. Data collection is scheduled to last 12 months. Each of the 10 vehicles has a data collection system that will support the evaluation.