A study of mandatory lane-changing execution behaviour model considering conflicts

Lane change models are one of the basic driver behaviour interactions in the microscopic traffic simulations for traffic, safety and transportation system analysis. However, many of the present traffic simulations mostly pay attention to the lane changing decision process, while the lane change execution process is often simplified or even ignored. This paper presents an exploratory study of lane change execution and proposes a lane changing behaviour model on arterial road where there is a block occurring on the curb-side lane to fit this situation. A video camera was used to collect data from an arterial road in Melbourne, Australia. When the mandatory lane-changing vehicle shifts from the current lane to the target lane, the driver adjusts its lane-changing execution behaviour to complete lane change safely by evaluating the blockage impact and surrounding traffic impact. The lane change execution model is developed as a combined model with blockage impact model and surrounding traffic impact model. The blockage impact model is considering the emergency status to perform lane change, using distance to block as the indicator. The surrounding traffic impact model detects the traffic conflicts between lane changing vehicle and the surrounding vehicles, using Fisher discriminant analysis method. A binary logit model is proposed to interpret the driver’s execution choice according to both the blockage impact and the surrounding traffic impact. In the conclusion, the paper provides a framework for the future work of lane change execution models on traffic simulation to assess the traffic safety and road efficiency.