Real-Time Prediction of Vehicle Trajectories for Proactively Identifying Risky Driving Behaviors at High-Speed Intersections

At high-speed intersections in many Chinese cities, a traffic-light warning sequence at the end of the green phase—three seconds of flashing green followed by three seconds of yellow—is commonly implemented. Such a long phase transition time leads to heterogeneous decision-making by approaching drivers as to whether to pass the signal or stop. Therefore, risky driving behaviors such as red-light running, abrupt stop, and aggressive pass are more likely to occur at these intersections. Proactive identification of risky behaviors can facilitate mitigation of the dilemma zone and development of on-board safety altering strategies. In this study, a real-time vehicle trajectory prediction method is proposed to help identify risky behaviors during the signal phase transition. Two cases are considered and treated differently in the proposed method: a single vehicle case and a following vehicle case. The adaptive Kalman filter (KF) model and the K-nearest neighbor model are integrated to predict vehicle trajectories. The adaptive KF model and intelligent driver model are fused to predict the following vehicles’ trajectories. The proposed models are calibrated and validated using 1,281 vehicle trajectories collected at three high-speed intersections in Shanghai. Results indicate that the root mean square error between the predicted trajectories and the actual trajectories is 5.02 m for single vehicles and 2.33 m for following vehicles. The proposed method is further applied to predict risky behaviors, including red-light running, abrupt stop, aggressive pass, speeding pass, and aggressive following. The overall prediction accuracy is 95.1% for the single vehicle case and 96.2% for the following vehicle case.