Lane Change Behavior of Manual Vehicles in Automated Vehicle Platooning Environments

Abstract

Analysis of the interaction between the automated vehicles and manual vehicles is very important in analyzing the performance of automated cooperative driving environments. In particular, the automated vehicle platooning can affect the driving behavior of adjacent manual vehicles. The purpose of this study is to analyze the lane change behavior of the manual vehicles in automated vehicle platonning environment and to conduct the experiment and questionnaire surveys in three stages. In the first stage, a video questionnaire survey was conducted, and responsive behaviors of manual vehicles were investigated. In second stage, the driving simulator experiments were conducted to investigate the lane change behaviors of in automated vehicle platonning environments. To analyze the lane change behavior of the manual vehicles, lane change durations and acceleration noise, which are indicators of traffic flow stability, were used. The driving behavior of manual vehicles were compared across different market penetration rates (MPR) of automated vehicles and human factors. Lastly, NASA-TLX (NASA Task Load Index) was used to evaluate the workload of the manual vehicle drivers. As a result of the analysis, it was identified that manual vehicle drivers had psychological burdens while driving in automated vehicle platonning environments. Lane change durations were longer when the MPR of the automated vehicles increased, and acceleration noise were increased in the case of 30-40 years old or female drivers. The results from this study can be used as a fundamental for more realistic traffic simulations reflecting the interaction between the automated vehicles and manual vehicles. It is also expected to effectively support the establishment of valuable transportation management strategy in automated vehicle environments. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.