Intermittent Control Properties of Car Following: I. Driving Simulator Experiments

A rather simple car driving simulator was created based on the available open source engine TORCS and used to analyze the basic features of human behavior in car driving within the car-following and free-driving setups. Four drivers with different skill in driving real cars participated in these experiments. They were instructed to driver a virtual car without overtaking the lead car driven by computer at a fixed speed and not to lose sight of it as well as to drive a virtual car on empty road in a style convenient individually. Based on the collected data the distribution of the headway, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are constructed and compared with available experimental data collected previously by the analysis of the real traffic flow. As the main results we draw a conclusion that the human behavior in car driving should be categorized as a generalized intermittent control with noisedriven activation of the active phase. Besides, we hypothesize that the car jerk is an individual phase variable required for describing car dynamics.