Exploring duration of lane change execution

Microscopic traffic simulation models are efficient and widely-used tools in traffic and transportation system analysis. Most simulations consider the lane-changing manoeuver as the decision-making process and treat lane-changing execution as an instantaneous action. Studies of lane changing indicate that the lane-changing action duration is generally in the range of 1s to 16s. The omission of lane-changing execution will significantly affect the outputs of the simulation. This paper analyses the characteristics of lane-changing execution and hypothesizes the duration of lane change execution has the positive relation with the traffic conflicts between the subject vehicle and the surrounding vehicles. Observed field data was used to test this hypothesis. Then a lane-changing execution duration predictive model is proposed for passenger cars and heavy vehicles separately. The models are estimated by using the video data collected from an arterial road in Melbourne.