Establishment and Validation of Mainline Driver Type Model at Expressway-Ramp Merging Area

Abstract

The driver characteristic is an important factor that affects driver behaviors, however, the existing driver behavior models little consider the influence of driver own characteristic differences on the driver behaviors. As the driver mental and physical behaviors in the process of driving are uncertainty and ambiguity, the mainline vehicles at expressway-ramp merging area are selected as research object, and the fuzzy clustering theory is introduced. In order to describe the mainline drivers characteristics accurately, the mainline vehicle acceleration, the relative speed of the current mainline vehicle to the all mainline vehicles and the lag gap of the mainline vehicle are selected to cluster by the fuzzy clustering method, and the driver type distribution model is built by K-S test method. Then, the driver type distribution data as a key parameter is incorporated into the expressway merging model, in order to represent the effect of driver characteristic on drive behavior. Finally, the microscopic traffic simulation system MTSS is taken as the simulation plat to build simulation model and validate the built mainline driver type model, the output results from the simulation system are compared with the field data, the satisfactory results indicate that the built driver type model can be used to describe the impact of driver type on driving behavior.