MODELING AND VERIFICATION OF HEAVY-DUTY TRUCK DRIVERS' CAR-FOLLOWING CHARACTERISTICS

In order to capture drivers' car-following characteristics and apply this information to the design of an Adaptive Cruise Control algorithm, this paper builds a driver car-following model with vehicle speed-dependent control gains. Proposed for use with heavy-duty truck drivers, we introduced the concept of driver sensitivity to tracking errors, identified driver's sensitivity to tracking errors and analyzed quantitatively the relationship between control gain and vehicle speed. To model the driver characteristics precisely and concisely, a SVE/SDE (Sensitivity to Velocity Error/Sensitivity to Distance Error) based linear car-following model was built and a nonlinear optimization algorithm was adopted to identify the model parameters. When validating the model accurancy, we proposed a comparative verification method based on hypothesis-testing theory here to reduce the influence of randomicity in the drivers' manipulation. The modeling and verification indicate that the proposed car-following model is superior to the tranditional linear car-following model, but its structure still approximates linear, which implies it is applicable for the design of a vehicular following controller.