Analysis of Driver Behavior and Intervehicular Collision: A Data-Based Traffic Modeling and Simulation Approach

Abstract

The emergence of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) is expected to contribute to resolving traffic congestion and safety problems; however, it is inevitable that ICV safety issues in mixed traffic (involving ICVs and human driven vehicles) will be a critical challenge. The numerical simulation of scenarios involving a mix of different driving profiles is expected to be an important safety assessment tool in the process of testing and validating ICVs, especially regarding extreme scenarios, including car collisions, which are rarely captured in real-world datasets. In this study, we propose a novel approach for car collision generation in numerical simulations based on the assumption that car collision occurrences are mostly associated with certain specific driver profiles. Using a dataset provided by the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) project, NGSIM 101 dataset, we identify three different driver profiles: aggressive, inattentive, and normal drivers. We then replicate car collision occurrences by varying the percentages of these three driver profiles in the simulated environment, allowing us to establish a relationship between driver profiles and car collision occurrences. We also investigate the severity of car collisions and classify them with respect to the driver profiles of the cars involved in the collisions. Our approach of replicating car collision occurrences in numerical simulations will facilitate the testing and validation of ICVs in the future, especially regarding the testing of ICV functionalities in dealing with traffic accidents.