For the master course Intelligent Transportation Systems, a concept was developed to give road users advice on lane changing. Either by an in-car system or an on-road system.
In the automotive industry, a lot of advanced driver assistance systems exists, including those that can keep a car centered in its lane. However, such systems do not provide the user with advice on when to change lanes and when its better not to. Due to unawareness of the driver and different driving styles, a lot of lane changes are initiates at the wrong moment and can disturb traffic flows.
In a team with two Civil Engineers, we designed a concept enveloping two systems. The on-road system dynamically divides the road into sections, reserving the most-right lane for exists and merges. It also freezes the lanes and discourages any lane changes. The in-car system uses this information to display the situation to the driver, adapted to its scenario (navigation data for example). Additionally, the in-car system uses radar sensors in the car to determine the speeds of surrounding vehicles. Based on this, it can advice the driver to switch lanes in order to maintain the driver’s preferred speed, or warn the driver when such a maneuver would disturb other traffic.
For this project, a lot of literature research was performed, along with traffic simulations in FOSIM and an online survey to understand the intuitiveness and cognitive effects of this concept on human drivers. My focus was on the in-car system; to explain the concept graphically and making an animation; and setting up the survey as well as evaluating its outcome. As a deliverable, a paper was written about our findings.
