Incorporating Instantaneous Reaction Delay in Car-Following Models: A Hybrid Approach

Author(s):  
Mehdi Rafati Fard ◽  
Saeed Rahmani ◽  
Afshin Shariat Mohaymany

Car-following is considered as one of the most prevalent fundamental driving behaviors that substantially influences traffic performance as well as road safety and capacity. Drivers’ car-following behavior is affected by numerous factors. However, in practice, very few of these factors have been scrutinized, because of their latent essence and unavailability of appropriate data. Owing to its importance, drivers’ reaction time has attracted the attention of many researchers; nevertheless, it is considered as a fixed parameter in car-following models, which is far from reality. To take the variability of drivers’ reaction time into account, a flexible hybrid approach has been suggested in the present study. In the proposed structure, in the first step, the desirable acceleration of the driver is estimated by applying an equation-based car-following model. In the next step, the driver’s reaction delay in applying the calculated acceleration is estimated by an artificial neural network. The corresponding parameters are jointly estimated by applying an estimated distribution algorithm. Statistical tests indicate better performance of the hybrid model, which considers the variations of the driver’s reaction time, compared with a traditional model with fixed reaction time. Furthermore, the cross-validation results indicate better generalizability and transferability of the proposed model in action.

Author(s):  
M.F. Aycin ◽  
R.F. Benekohal

A linear acceleration car-following model has been developed for realistic simulation of traffic flow in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) applications. The new model provides continuous acceleration profiles instead of the stepwise profiles that are currently used. The brake reaction times of the drivers are simulated effectively and are independent of the simulation time steps. Chain-reaction times of the drivers are also simulated and perception thresholds are incorporated in the model. The preferred time headways are utilized to determine the simulated drivers’ separation during car-following. The features of the model and the realistic vehicle simulation in car-following and in stop-and-go conditions make this model suitable to ITS, especially to autonomous intelligent cruise-control systems. The car-following algorithm is validated at microscopic and macroscopic levels by using field data. Simulated versus field trajectories and statistical tests show very strong agreement between simulation results and field data.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (18) ◽  
pp. 5034
Author(s):  
Yang Zhou ◽  
Rui Fu ◽  
Chang Wang ◽  
Ruibin Zhang

Building a human-like car-following model that can accurately simulate drivers’ car-following behaviors is helpful to the development of driving assistance systems and autonomous driving. Recent studies have shown the advantages of applying reinforcement learning methods in car-following modeling. However, a problem has remained where it is difficult to manually determine the reward function. This paper proposes a novel car-following model based on generative adversarial imitation learning. The proposed model can learn the strategy from drivers’ demonstrations without specifying the reward. Gated recurrent units was incorporated in the actor-critic network to enable the model to use historical information. Drivers’ car-following data collected by a test vehicle equipped with a millimeter-wave radar and controller area network acquisition card was used. The participants were divided into two driving styles by K-means with time-headway and time-headway when braking used as input features. Adopting five-fold cross-validation for model evaluation, the results show that the proposed model can reproduce drivers’ car-following trajectories and driving styles more accurately than the intelligent driver model and the recurrent neural network-based model, with the lowest average spacing error (19.40%) and speed validation error (5.57%), as well as the lowest Kullback-Leibler divergences of the two indicators used for driving style clustering.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atif Mehmood

Rear-end collisions are one of the serious traffic safety problems. These collisions occur when the following vehicle driver is inattentive or could not judge a potential rear-end collision situation. The use of rear-end collision warning systems (RECWS) may help drivers to avoid rear-end collision. The existing systems assumed constant driver reaction time for all driver population in their design and evaluation. They also ignore variations in driver characteristics, such as age and gender. The objectives of this thesis research are: (1) to develop reaction-time models that incorporate driver characteristics, (2) to develop a car-following simulation model that represents driver behaviour, and (3) to develop a rear-end collision warning system that accounts for driver characteristics and produces reliable collision warnings. In the human-factors study, four driver reaction-time models are developed for four different car-following scenarios: lead vehicle decelerating with normal deceleration rate, lead vehicle decelerating with emergency deceleration rate, lead vehicle stationary, and car-following acceleration regime. These models describe how the driver and situational factors affect reaction-time. The driver factors include age and gender, and the situational factors include speed and spacing between the following and lead vechiles. The developed car-following model assumes that drivers adjust their speeds based on information of both the lead and the back vehicles. The model also assumes that the driver reaction-time varies based on driver characteristics and kinematics. The proposed model represents driver behaviour in acceleration, deceleration, and steady state regimes of the car-following scenarios. Another unique feature of the model is that it explicitly considers information on the back vehicle. The model is calibrated and validated using vehicle tracking database. The driver reaction-time models and other kinematics constraints were integrated to develop a driver-sensitive rear-end collision warning system algorithm (RECWA). The developed car-following model is used to evaluate and validate the performance of the proposed RECWA. The results show that the proposed RECWA is functioning and producing reliable results. With further research and development, the proposed algorithm can be integrated into driving simulators or real vehicles to further evaluate and examine its benefits.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (06) ◽  
pp. 1950025 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caleb Ronald Munigety

Modeling the dynamics of a traffic system involves using the principles of both physical and social sciences since it is composed of vehicles as well as drivers. A novel car-following model is proposed in this paper by incorporating the socio-psychological aspects of drivers into the dynamics of a purely physics-based spring–mass–damper mechanical system to represent the driver–vehicle longitudinal movements in a traffic stream. The crux of this model is that a traffic system can be viewed as various masses interacting with each other by means of springs and dampers attached between them. While the spring and damping constants represent the driver behavioral parameters, the mass component represents the vehicle characteristics. The proposed model when tested for its ability to capture the traffic system dynamics both at micro, driver, and macro, stream, levels behaved pragmatically. The stability analysis carried out using perturbation method also revealed that the proposed model is both locally and asymptotically stable.


2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (09) ◽  
pp. 1005-1014 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEIZO SHIGAKI ◽  
JUN TANIMOTO ◽  
AYA HAGISHIMA

The stochastic optimal velocity (SOV) model, which is a cellular automata model, has been widely used because of its good reproducibility of the fundamental diagram, despite its simplicity. However, it has a drawback: in SOV, a vehicle that is temporarily stopped takes a long time to restart. This study proposes a revised SOV model that suppresses this particular defect; the basic concept of this model is derived from the car-following model, which considers the velocity gap between a particular vehicle and the preceding vehicle. A series of simulations identifies the model parameters and clarifies that the proposed model can reproduce the three traffic phases: free, jam, and even synchronized phases, which cannot be achieved by the conventional SOV model.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
JingJing Ye ◽  
KePing Li ◽  
XueDong Jiang

We propose a new traffic model which is based on the traditional OV (optimal velocity) car-following model. Here, some realistic factors are regarded as uncertain quantity, such as the headway distance. Our aim is to analyze and discuss the stability of car-following model under the constraint of uncertain factors. Then, according to the principle of expected value in fuzzy theory, an improved OV traffic model is constructed. Simulation results show that our proposed model can avoid collisions effectively under uncertain environment, and its stability can also be improved. Moreover, we discuss its stability as some parameters change, such as the relaxation time.


2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (09) ◽  
pp. 1350061 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIANZHONG CHEN ◽  
ZHONGKE SHI ◽  
YANMEI HU ◽  
LEI YU ◽  
YUAN FANG

In this paper, we present an extended car-following model with consideration of the gravitational force. A new macroscopic model taking into account the slope effects is developed using the relationship between the microscopic and macroscopic variables. The proposed model is applied to reflect the effect of the slope on uniform flow, traffic waves and small perturbation. The simulation results demonstrate that both the angle and the length of the slope have important impacts on traffic flow. The effect of the slope becomes more significant with the increase of the slope angle.


Author(s):  
M. Poor Arab Moghadam ◽  
P. Pahlavani

Car following models as well-known moving objects trajectory problems have been used for more than half a century in all traffic simulation software for describing driving behaviour in traffic flows. However, previous empirical studies and modeling about car following behavior had some important limitations. One of the main and clear defects of the introduced models was the very large number of parameters that made their calibration very time-consuming and costly. Also, any change in these parameters, even slight ones, severely disrupted the output. In this study, an artificial neural network approximator was used to introduce a trajectory model for vehicle movements. In this regard, the Levenberg-Marquardt back propagation function and the hyperbolic tangent sigmoid function were employed as the training and the transfer functions, respectively. One of the important aspects in identifying driver behavior is the reaction time. This parameter shows the period between the time the driver recognizes a stimulus and the time a suitable response is shown to that stimulus. In this paper, the actual data on car following from the NGSIM project was used to determine the performance of the proposed model. This dataset was used for the purpose of expanding behavioral algorithm in micro simulation. Sixty percent of the data was entered into the designed artificial neural network approximator as the training data, twenty percent as the testing data, and twenty percent as the evaluation data. A statistical and a micro simulation method were employed to show the accuracy of the proposed model. Moreover, the two popular Gipps and Helly models were implemented. Finally, it was shown that the accuracy of the proposed model was much higher - and its computational costs were lower - than those of other models when calibration operations were not performed on these models. Therefore, the proposed model can be used for displaying and predicting trajectories of moving objects being followed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atif Mehmood

Rear-end collisions are one of the serious traffic safety problems. These collisions occur when the following vehicle driver is inattentive or could not judge a potential rear-end collision situation. The use of rear-end collision warning systems (RECWS) may help drivers to avoid rear-end collision. The existing systems assumed constant driver reaction time for all driver population in their design and evaluation. They also ignore variations in driver characteristics, such as age and gender. The objectives of this thesis research are: (1) to develop reaction-time models that incorporate driver characteristics, (2) to develop a car-following simulation model that represents driver behaviour, and (3) to develop a rear-end collision warning system that accounts for driver characteristics and produces reliable collision warnings. In the human-factors study, four driver reaction-time models are developed for four different car-following scenarios: lead vehicle decelerating with normal deceleration rate, lead vehicle decelerating with emergency deceleration rate, lead vehicle stationary, and car-following acceleration regime. These models describe how the driver and situational factors affect reaction-time. The driver factors include age and gender, and the situational factors include speed and spacing between the following and lead vechiles. The developed car-following model assumes that drivers adjust their speeds based on information of both the lead and the back vehicles. The model also assumes that the driver reaction-time varies based on driver characteristics and kinematics. The proposed model represents driver behaviour in acceleration, deceleration, and steady state regimes of the car-following scenarios. Another unique feature of the model is that it explicitly considers information on the back vehicle. The model is calibrated and validated using vehicle tracking database. The driver reaction-time models and other kinematics constraints were integrated to develop a driver-sensitive rear-end collision warning system algorithm (RECWA). The developed car-following model is used to evaluate and validate the performance of the proposed RECWA. The results show that the proposed RECWA is functioning and producing reliable results. With further research and development, the proposed algorithm can be integrated into driving simulators or real vehicles to further evaluate and examine its benefits.


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