Effects of intelligent control mechanism on multiple-vehicle collision under emergency

In this paper, we study the effects of intelligent control mechanism on multiple-vehicle collision induced by a sudden stop. The control motion of following vehicles is extended by introducing their velocity relative to the braking one into the dynamic models. We study the dynamic process of multiple-vehicle collision under the new control mechanism with finding that the new control mechanism can effectively avoid the first following vehicle’s collision with the stopped vehicle, and the new consideration behaves better in reducing the number of crumpled vehicles than the existing control method. We obtain the region maps of the multiple-vehicle collision for the new intelligent control. We show the dependence of the number of the crumpled vehicles on the initial headway, the sensitivity, and the intensity of the intelligent control. In addition, the effects of the transfer delay on multiple-vehicle collision are obtained by drawing the phase diagram of the multiple-vehicle collision for the new intelligent control with different transfer delays. It is revealed that the negative effects of the delay on the multiple-vehicle collision can be mitigated by enhancing the strength of the intelligent control.