Assessment of Driving Proficiency When Drivers Utilize Assistance Systems—The Case of Adaptive Cruise Control

Abstract

Driver assistance systems (ADAS), and especially those containing driving automation, change the role of drivers to supervisors who need to safeguard the system’s operation. Despite the aim to increase safety, the new tasks (supervision and intervention) may jeopardize safety. Consequently, safety officers address the need for specific training on ADAS. However, these tasks are not assessed in driver licensing today. Therefore, we developed a framework to assess in-practice driving proficiency when drivers utilize ADAS. This study evaluated whether the proposed framework is able to identify meaningful differences in driving proficiency between driving with and without assistance. We applied the framework to perform a qualitative assessment of driving proficiency with 12 novice drivers in a field experiment, comparable to a license test. The assistance system concerned Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC). The test showed that driving with ACC has a negative influence on self-initiated manoeuvres (especially lane changes) and sometimes led to improved adaptations to manoeuvres initiated by other road users (like merging in traffic). These results are in line with previous research and demonstrate the framework’s successfulness to assess novice drivers’ proficiency to utilize ADAS in road-traffic. Therewith, the proposed framework provides important means for driving instructors and examiners to address the safe operation of ADAS.

Characteristic Analysis and Decision Model of Lane-Changing Game for Intelligent Connected Vehicles

“…Since the safety of vehicles interacts with each other, the lane-changing game requires both sides of the game to make corresponding decisions; when the LV changes lanes, it requires the RV to slow down to provide lane-change spacing for the LV. Equation (5) shows the safety gain of the vehicles.…”

“…The evolutionary game is a theoretical approach to analyzing the rationality of decision making through dynamic evolutionary equations, which can consider the limited rationality of decision makers and reduce the assumptions of the model compared with other game models. At present, the research on vehicle lane changes mostly focuses on the highway [5][6][7] and intersection scenarios [8,9], because these scenarios belong to traffic bottleneck sections, and vehicle lane changing in bottleneck sections is a difficult problem. In this paper, taking the urban intersection road as an example, the forced lane-change interaction characteristics of connected autonomous vehicles are analyzed; the convergence process of vehicle lane-change decisions is dynamically analyzed by an evolutionary game model, and sensitivity analysis of the main factors is conducted to explore the influence of road traffic environment changes on vehicle lane changes; and the vehicle trajectory and output collision time are simulated by SUMO to analyze the collision risk of vehicles; and, finally, further research is summarized and extended.…”