Measuring and Describing Cooperation Between Road Users—Results from CoMove

Abstract

Safe and efficient traffic requires that road users interact and cooperate with each other. Especially in situations which are not explicitly regulated, and the right of way is not clearly defined, it is of great importance that road users are able to communicate their own intentions and understand the communication and cooperation behaviour of the other involved road users. When automated vehicles enter the current traffic system, their ability to fit into the system, that is their ability to communicate and cooperate, will determine their success. Therefore, the development of cooperatively interacting, automated vehicles requires detailed knowledge about human cooperation behaviour in traffic, which can only be obtained using appropriate methods and measures. By focusing on road narrowings and lane changing, this chapter gives an overview on how to measure cooperation between road users, considering methods for data collection, subjective and objective measures of cooperation as well as behaviour modeling, to support the systematic research on cooperation in road traffic. This overview is extended by findings from studies conducted within CoInCar, including results on factors influencing human behaviour in cooperative situations, either in a manual or an automated setting, and initial findings from modeling the cognitive processes underlying cooperative driving behaviour.