Determining an appropriate time to execute a lane change is a critical issue for the development of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs).However, few studies have considered the rear and the front vehicle-driver's risk perception while developing a human-like lane-change decision model. This paper aims to develop a lane-change decision model for AVs and to identify a two level threshold that conforms to a driver's perception of the ability to safely change lanes with a rear vehicle approaching fast. Based on the signal detection theory and extreme moment trials on a real highway, two thresholds of safe lane change were determined with consideration of risk perception of the rear and the subject vehicle drivers, respectively. The rear vehicle's Minimum Safe Deceleration (MSD) during the lane change maneuver of the subject vehicle was selected as the lane change safety indicator, and was calculated using the proposed human-like lane-change decision model. The results showed that, compared with the driver in the front extreme moment trial, the driver in the rear extreme moment trial is more conservative during the lane change process. To meet the safety expectations of the subject and rear vehicle drivers, the primary and secondary safe thresholds were determined to be 0.85 m/s 2 and 1.76 m/s 2 , respectively. The decision model can help make AVs safer and more polite during lane changes, as it not only improves acceptance of the intelligent driving system, but also further ensures the rear vehicle's driver's safety.interval from 3 m to 25 m, from 25 m to 45 m, and from 45 m to 70 m. Wakasugi [20] recommended a two-level TTC threshold of 3 s and 5 s, respectively. However, the computed TTC threshold would be easily influenced by the relative speed and distance between the rear vehicle and the subject vehicle.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Related works on lane-change decision models and safety indicator thresholds are introduced in Section 2. Section 3 introduces the naturalistic lane-change trial and extreme moment trials. Section 4 presents the lane-change decision model and the calibration parameters of the model. The two-level threshold based on the proposed model is determined in Section 5. Finally, a discussion and conclusion are presented in Section 6.
MethodOn-road experiment is the main research method used in this paper, and the experiments include the naturalistic lane-change trial and extreme moment trials. The purpose of the naturalistic trial is to calibrate the parameters of the proposed lane-change decision model. The extreme moment trials are used to accurately capture the variation of driver cognition characteristics of lane-change safety. In this section, we willintroduce the required equipment, participants, test route and procedures for the experiments in detail.
ApparatusThe test vehicle is depicted in Figure 1. The test vehicle used in our experiments was a 2008 Volkswagen Touran, equipped with a Lane Mark Recognition system (Mobileye C2-170, made by Mobileye Company, Jerusalem, Isra...