Title
On Social Interactions of Merging Behaviors at Highway On-Ramps in Congested Traffic
Abstract
Merging at highway on-ramps while interacting with other human-driven vehicles is challenging for autonomous vehicles (AVs). An efficient route to this challenge requires exploring and exploiting knowledge of the interaction process from demonstrations by humans. However, it is unclear what information (or environmental states) is utilized by the human driver to guide their behavior throughout the whole merging process. This paper provides quantitative analysis and evaluation of the merging behavior at highway on-ramps with congested traffic in a volume of time and space. Two types of social interaction scenarios are considered based on the social preferences of surrounding vehicles: <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">courteous</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">rude</i> . The significant levels of environmental states for characterizing the interactive merging process are empirically analyzed based on the real-world INTERACTION dataset. Experimental results reveal two fundamental mechanisms in the merging process: 1) Human drivers select different states to make sequential decisions at different moments of task execution; and 2) the social preference of surrounding vehicles can impact variable selection for making decisions. It implies that efficient decision-making design should filter out irrelevant information while considering social preference to achieve comparable human-level performance. These essential findings shed light on developing new decision-making approaches for AVs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TITS.2021.3102407
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Social interaction,merging behavior,decision making,highway on-ramps
Journal
23
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
1524-9050
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
12
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Huanjie Wang111.04
Wenshuo Wang200.34
Shihua Yuan300.68
Xueyuan Li423.44
Lijun Sun58217.07