Modelling a Driver's Motivation and Opportunity to Change Lanes on Dual Carriageway Roads

Abstract

The paper considers the application of neural networks to model driver decisions to change lane on a dual carriageway road. The lane changing process is treated as consisting of two decisions, namely motivation and opportunity. Separate backpropagation neural networks are applied to represent each of the two decisions. The trained motivation and opportunity neural network models are linked to produce a layered network which represents the complete lane changing process. Separate models are developed to represent the nearside to offside lane changing decision, and the offside to nearside lane changing decision. This paper describes the development of the model of the nearside to offside lane changing decision.

For model development, data were collected from several subject vehicle drivers. The results are presented and the implications considered. Selected data were applied to train the neural networks and then an independent subset of data were used to assess performance. When the complete nearside lane changing neural network model was presented with the unseen test examples, 93.3% of the examples were correctly predicted as a lane change or no lane change. These results are shown to be a considerable improvement on those obtained previously.

Citation

Leung, F.-L. and Hunt, J. (1998), "Modelling a Driver's Motivation and Opportunity to Change Lanes on Dual Carriageway Roads", Griffiths, J.D. (Ed.) Mathematics in Transport Planning and Control, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 311-320. https://doi.org/10.1108/9780585474182-030