TY - JOUR
T1 - Human Merging Behavior in a Coupled Driving Simulator
T2 - How Do We Resolve Conflicts?
AU - Siebinga, Olger
AU - Zgonnikov, Arkady
AU - Abbink, David A.
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - 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, we conducted an experiment in a coupled driving simulator with a simplified, top-down view, merging scenario with two vehicles. We found that kinematics can explain the outcome (i.e., which driver merges first) and the duration of the merging conflict. Furthermore, our 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. We hope our work can contribute to this development and to the fundamental knowledge of interactive driver behaviour.
AB - 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, we conducted an experiment in a coupled driving simulator with a simplified, top-down view, merging scenario with two vehicles. We found that kinematics can explain the outcome (i.e., which driver merges first) and the duration of the merging conflict. Furthermore, our 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. We hope our work can contribute to this development and to the fundamental knowledge of interactive driver behaviour.
KW - Data models
KW - Games
KW - Kinematics
KW - Measurement
KW - Merging
KW - Vehicles
KW - Visualization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85182383874&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/OJITS.2024.3349635
DO - 10.1109/OJITS.2024.3349635
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85182383874
SN - 2687-7813
VL - 5
SP - 103
EP - 114
JO - IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems
JF - IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems
ER -