On some experimental features of car-following behavior and how to model them

Abstract

Abstract:We have carried out car-following experiments with a 25-car-platoon on an open road section to study the relation between a car's speed and its spacing under various traffic conditions, in the hope to resolve a controversy surrounding this fundamental relation of vehicular traffic. In this paper we extend our previous analysis of these experiments, and report new experimental findings. In particular, we reveal that the platoon length (hence the average spacing within a platoon) might be significantly different even if the average velocity of the platoon is essentially the same. The findings further demonstrate that the traffic states span a 2D region in the speed-spacing (or density) plane. The common practice of using a single speed-spacing curve to model vehicular traffic ignores the variability and imprecision of human driving and is therefore inadequate. We have proposed a car-following model based on a mechanism that in certain ranges of speed and spacing, drivers are insensitive to the changes in spacing when the velocity differences between cars are small. It was shown that the model can reproduce the experimental results well.

Empirical analysis and simulation of the concave growth pattern of traffic oscillations

“…We analyzed the US-101 trajectory data in the Next Generation Simulation data sets (NGSIM, 2006), which were collected on a 640m segment on the south-bound direction of US-101 (Hollywood A. It can be seen that the standard deviations increase in a concave way in all examples, as observed in the car-following experiments in Jiang et al (2014Jiang et al ( , 2015. Figure 5(a)), each set of data has been shifted horizontally to make the dataset match each other (see Appendix B…”

“…Now we revisit the car-following experiments in Jiang et al (2014Jiang et al ( , 2015. In the experiments, the driver of the leading car is required to control the velocity of the car at certain pre-determined constant values vl.…”

On the role of speed adaptation and spacing indifference in traffic instability: Evidence from car-following experiments and its stochastic model

“…In this paper, the stationary states of the 25-car-platoon experiments (Jiang et al, 2014(Jiang et al, , 2015 will be extracted and analyzed. Since the GPS devices record the speed every dt = 0.1 s, we calculate the acceleration via…”

How Much Data is Enough? A Statistical Approach with Case Study on Longitudinal Driving Behavior

“…Higgs and Abbas [25] collected the NDD based on in-vehicle cameras, radars, and CAN-Bus signals to analyze a driver's car-following patterns. In addition, the high-precision difference in GPS devices (e.g., Multi-functional Satellite Augmentation System, a product from Japan) can also be directly used to record vehicle speed and position, which can be applied to a pair of cars or car-platoon behaviors [53]. Currently, most data acquisition systems on the market, such as Mobileye used in SPMD program [17] and the data acquisition system in SHRP 2 program developed by VTTI [63] , can be reliably used to collect driving data.…”