Car-Following Model with Automatic Reaction Delay Estimation: An Attention-Based Ensemble Learning Methodology

Abstract

Car-following behavior is a vital traffic phenomenon in the process of vehicle driving. For modeling the car-following behavior, it is crucial to capture the reaction delay for balancing with safety and comfort, but it is generally ignored in existing works. This work proposes a car-following model based on attention-based ensemble learning to automatically capture the reaction delay from driving data and better depict the traffic flow characteristics. The model integrates a data-driven model and a theory-driven model, and a weight computation method is proposed to combine the advantage of these two different models. In detail, an encoder-decoder model and attention mechanism are employed to capture the reaction delay from driving data. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model could balance safety with comfort and help avoid unsafe driving behavior.