Effect of Driver Scope Awareness in the Lane Changing Maneuvers Using Cellular Automaton Model

This paper investigated the effect of drivers’ visibility and their perception (e.g., to estimate the speed and arrival time of another vehicle) on the lane changing maneuver. The term of scope awareness was used to describe the visibility required by the driver to make a perception about road condition and the speed of vehicle that exist in that road. A computer simulation model was conducted to show this driver awareness behavior. This studying attempt to precisely catching the lane changing behavior and illustrate the scope awareness parameter that reflects driver behavior. This paper proposes a simple cellular automata model for studying driver visibility effects of lane changing maneuver and driver perception of estimated speed. Different values of scope awareness were examined to capture its effect on the traffic flow. Simulation results show the ability of this model to capture the important features of lane changing maneuver and revealed the appearance of the shortthin solid line jam and the wide solid line jam in the traffic flow as the consequences of lane changing maneuver. Keywords—scope awareness; lane changing meneuver; speed estimation; spontaneous braking.