Research
Vehicle technologies and traffic impact
How ADAS, lane-keeping assist, and electric powertrains change traffic efficiency and safety at the system level.
A vehicle is no longer a fixed object in a flow model — it is a moving system whose perception, control, and powertrain shape its behavior. We characterize ADAS-equipped and electric vehicles empirically and analytically, then quantify what their adoption implies for capacity, stability, and safety on existing roadways.
Specific work includes: car-following calibration for production ACC and LKA systems; the energy-efficiency / throughput trade-off introduced by EV speed-power profiles; and how partial market penetration of automated features changes the distribution of headways and the probability of rear-end conflicts. We collaborate with vehicle dynamics researchers and rely on a mix of test-track data, naturalistic driving data, and microsimulation.
Featured release: OpenLKA dataset
OpenLKA — released January 2025 — is the first open dataset of lane-keeping-assist (LKA) behavior collected from market autonomous vehicles. It pairs CAN-bus signals with synchronized video and lane-perception data across multiple production vehicles, supporting research on LKA performance variability, mixed-autonomy traffic, and disengagement modeling.
Selected papers
- Wang, Alhuraish, Yuan, Wang, Zhou. OpenLKA: an open dataset of lane keeping assist from market autonomous vehicles. arXiv preprint.
- Zhou, A. Zhou, Ding, Laval, Peeta. Empirical study on the acceleration/deceleration constraints under commercial adaptive cruise control. IEEE ITSC 2022.
- Zhou, A. Zhou, Laval, Liu, Peeta. Incorporating driver relaxation into factory adaptive cruise control to reduce lane-change disruptions. Transportation Research Record.
- Zhou, Wang, Cheng, Ma. Numerical study of Bernoulli effect on bus controllability and driving safety. Transportation Research Record.
See the full publications page for the rest.