
SAE Level Execution of steering,
acceleration/deceleration
Monitoring of
driving environment
Fallback performance
of dynamic driving task
System capability
(driving modes)
0 (No automation) Human Human Human N/A
1 (Driver assistance) Human & system Human Human Some driving modes
2 (Partial automation) System Human Human Some driving modes
3 (Conditional automation) System System Human Some driving modes
4 (High automation) System System System Some driving modes
5 (Full automation) System System System All driving modes
Table 1: SAE Levels of Vehicle Automation
Motion Prediction
of Remote Vehicle
Motion Planning
of Ego Vehicle
Control of
Ego Vehicle
Status Sharing Ego Vehicle Ego Vehicle Ego Vehicle
Intent Sharing Remote Vehicle Ego Vehicle Ego Vehicle
Agreement Seeking Remote Vehicle Remote Vehicle Ego Vehicle
Prescriptive Cooperation Remote Vehicle Remote Vehicle Remote Vehicle
Table 2: SAE Levels of Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA)
significantly improve energy efficiency, an accurate prediction is very hard to make without additional information,
since the motions of neighboring vehicles can be highly correlated or completely stochastic.
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication can potentially resolve this problem. Peer-to-peer communication en-
ables connected vehicles to share information for prediction and control, as well as facilitates cooperation among
vehicles in the traffic. SAE categorized cooperative driving automation (CDA) into status-sharing, intent-sharing,
agreement-seeking and prescriptive cooperation [7]; see Table 2. Many of the existing research works assume high
level of cooperation, e.g., prescriptive cooperation. Assuming that an entire platoon of vehicles are connected and
automated, the high level of cooperation enables centralized control over all these vehicles. Such controllers are often
referred to as cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC). Similar to ACC, CACC design can also be categorized
into reactive and predictive control [8, 9]. Reactive control tries to synchronize the speed of the platoon, guaranteeing
string stability and maintaining desirable headway [10, 11]. On the other hand, predictive controllers have access
to the future motion plans of leading vehicles, therefore coordinated and even global optimization becomes possi-
ble [12, 13, 14, 15, 16]. To make the system more scalable, distributed control protocol has also been studied [17].
Research has shown that CACC and platooning bring significant energy benefits under different scenarios [18, 19, 20].
However, currently the V2V technology is far from being widely deployed. The assumption of high penetration of
connectivity and high level of cooperation is hard to realize in practice in the near future.
The near future of transportation is more likely to evolve into mixed traffic. Controllers that operate under mixed
traffic consisting of connected and non-connected vehicles are referred to as connected cruise control (CCC). Only
low-level cooperation as status-sharing is assumed and centralized control is not possible. Potentially four kinds of
vehicles may paticipate in the mixed traffic: human-driven vehicle (HV), connected human-driven vehicle (CHV), au-
tomated vehicle (AV) and connected and automated vehicle (CAV). Without connectivity, the longitudinal controllers
for AVs execute adaptive cruise control. While with connectivity, CAVs may execute more performant controllers,
even with low level of cooperation such as status-sharing protocol. In CCC, CAVs have access to beyond-line-of-sight
information of CHVs and CAVs in the distance, which is incorporated into the controller design. Similar to ACC and
CACC, CCC can also be categorized into reactive control and predictive control. Reactive CCC (RCCC) takes the
V2V information from leading vehicles as reference signals, the objective is still to synchronize the speed in the traffic
for string stability and smooth driving [21, 22, 23]. Meanwhile, predictive CCC (PCCC) can incorporate the informa-
tion of preceding vehicles to make predictions on the motion of the vehicle immediately in the front [24]. This may
significantly improve predictions, and enable optimized planning of motions in advance, which may reduce speed
variations and save energy. In Fig. 1 the concepts of RACC, PACC, RCCC, and PCCC are illustrated graphically for
mixed traffic scenarios containing HVs, AVs, CHVs, and CAVs.
With all these distinctions made, this paper presents contributions to improve energy efficiency in mixed traffic as
2