A general class of car-following models is analyzed where the longitudinal acceleration of a vehicle is determined by a nonlinear function of the distance to the vehicle in front, their velocity difference, and the vehicle’s own velocity. The driver’s response to these stimuli includes the driver reaction time that appears as a time delay in governing differential equations. The linear stabilit...

This paper presents recent results of on-going research to build new maps of driver performance in car-following situations. The novel performance map is comprised of four driving states: low risk, conflict, near crash, and crash imminent – which correspond to advisory warning, crash imminent warning, and crash mitigation countermeasures. The paper addresses two questions dealing with the appro...

In order to overcome urban space constraints, underground road systems are becoming popular options for cities. Existing literature suggests that accident rates in road tunnels are lower than those in open roads. However, there is a lack of understanding in how the road tunnel environment affects inter-vehicle interactions. In this study, car following data are obtained from traffic video foota...

This paper presents a stochastic driver behavior modeling framework which takes into account both individual and general driving characteristics as one aggregate model. Patterns of individual driving styles are modeled using a Dirichlet process mixture model, as a non-parametric Bayesian approach which automatically selects the optimal number of model components to fit sparse observations of ea...

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 ...

This paper provides a link between car following theory and the economic theory of road congestion by means of a theory of speed choice. According to this theory speed choice is based on a trade-off between the benefits (shorter travel time) and cost (higher accident risk) of driving faster. Accident risk is related to the distance to the ‘leader’ and by elaborating this relationship a number o...

The car-following behavior of individual drivers in real city traffic is studied on the basis of (publicly available) trajectory datasets recorded by a vehicle equipped with an radar sensor. By means of a nonlinear optimization procedure based on a genetic algorithm, we calibrate the Intelligent Driver Model and the Velocity Difference Model by minimizing the deviations between the observed dri...

We analyse the dynamics of the classical optimal velocity model for the case of inhomogeneous drivers and for the case of road works. We introduce a different viewpoint, the so-called rotation solutions, which in case of an additional symmetry leads to the POM solutions. This approach opens the possibility to analytical and numerical bifurcation studies, which show a big variety in the possible...

We propose a general model to derive lane-changing rules for discretionary and mandatory lane changes for a wide class of car-following models. Both the utility of a given lane and the risk associated with lane changes is determined in terms of longitudinal accelerations calculated with the microscopic traffic models. This allows for the formulation of compact and general safety and incentive c...