Modeling Vehicle Interactions during Lane-Changing Behavior on Arterial Streets

Lane-changing algorithms have attracted increased attention during recent years in traffic modeling. However, little has been done to address the competition and cooperation of vehicles when changing lanes on urban streets. The main goal of this study is to quantify the vehicle interactions during a lane-changing maneuver. Video data collected at a busy arterial street in Gainesville, Florida, were used to distinguish between free, forced, and competitive/cooperative lane changes. Models particularly for competitive/cooperative lane changes were developed, depending on whether the following vehicle cooperates with the subject vehicle or not. By referring to the ‘TCP/IP’ protocol in computer network communications, a sequence of ‘hand-shaking’ negotiations were designed to handle the competition and cooperation among vehicles. The developed model was implemented and validated in the CORSIM microsimulator package, with the simulation capabilities compared against the original lane-changing model in CORSIM. The results indicate that the new model better replicates the observed traffic under different levels of congestion.