Human Merging Behavior in a Coupled Driving Simulator: How Do We Resolve Conflicts?

Traffic interactions between merging and highway vehicles are a major topic of research, yielding many empirical studies and models of driver behaviour. Most of these studies on merging use naturalistic data. Although this provides insight into human gap acceptance and traffic flow effects, it obscures the operational inputs of interacting drivers. Besides that, researchers have no control over the vehicle kinematics (i.e., positions and velocities) at the start of the interactions. Therefore the relationship between initial kinematics and the outcome of the interaction is difficult to investigate. To address these gaps, the authors conducted an experiment in a coupled driving simulator with a simplified, top-down view, merging scenario with two vehicles. They found that kinematics can explain the outcome (i.e., which driver merges first) and the duration of the merging conflict. Furthermore, their results show that drivers use key decision moments combined with constant acceleration inputs (intermittent piecewise-constant control) during merging. This indicates that they do not continuously optimise their expected utility. Therefore, these results advocate the development of interaction models based on intermittent piecewise-constant control. They hope their work can contribute to this development and to the fundamental knowledge of interactive driver behaviour.

• Record URL:
  • http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/OJITS.2024.3349635
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/26877813
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © 2024 The Authors.
• Authors:
  • Siebinga, Olger
  • Zgonnikov, Arkady
  • Abbink, David A
• Publication Date: 2024

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 103-114
• Serial:
  • IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems
  • Volume: 5
  • Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • ISSN: 2687-7813
• Publication flags:

  Open Access (libre)

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Driving behavior; Kinematics; Merging traffic; Traffic conflicts
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01936953
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Nov 15 2024 9:48AM