Automobile driving--Lane changing

Today’s mainstream vehicles are partially automated via an advanced driver assistance feature (ADAS) known as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC). ACC uses data from on-board sensors to automatically adjust speed to maintain a safe following distance with the preceding vehicle. Contrary to expectations, ICE vehicles equipped with ACC may reduce capacity at bottlenecks because its delayed response and limited initial acceleration during queue discharge could increase the average headway. On the other hand, ACC equipped EVs can potentially mitigate this effect for having ready torque and quicker acceleration. However, this has not been investigated for cases when lane changers enter from the adjacent lane. ACC could respond differently under these conditions, and this car following behavior is often referred as receiving lane change car following. Carefully planned field experiments on lane change car following demonstrate that lane changes and the subsequent receiving lane change car following from ICE vehicles equipped with ACC increases the gap unless the lane changer and the target lane traffic have identical or similar speeds for internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and ACC in the EVs doesn’t increase the gap after lane change increasing capacity for merging compared to ICE vehicles. For ICE, this trend also correlates with the selected ACC gap, with larger gap selection resulting in longer gap following the lane change maneuver and the receiving lane change car following in response. Larger gap setting shows better results after lane change for EVs.

According to a March 2019 publication by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration(NHTSA), 62% of all police-reported accidents in the United States between 2011 and 2015 could have been prevented or mitigated with the use of five groups of collision avoidance technologies in passenger vehicles: (1) forward collision prevention, (2) lane keeping, (3) blind zone detection, (4) forward pedestrian impact, and (5) backing collision avoidance. These technologies work mostly by reducing or removing the risks involved in a lane change maneuver; yet, the Broward transportation management system does not directly address these risk. Therefore, we are proposing a Machine Learning based approach to real-time accident prediction for Broward I-95 using the C5.1 Decision Tree and the Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network to address them. To do this, we design a new measure of volatility, Lane Change Volatility(LCV), which measures the potential for a lane change in a segment of the highway. Our research found that LCV is an important predictor of accidents in an exit zone and when considered in tandem with current system variable, such as lighting conditions, the machine learning classifiers are able to predict accidents in the exit zone with an accuracy rate of over 98%.