(IJARAI) International Journal of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 4, No.8, 2015 34 | Page www.ijarai.thesai.org Driver’s Awareness and Lane Changing Maneuver in Traffic Flow based on Cellular Automaton Model Kohei Arai 1 1 Graduate School of Science and Engineering Saga University Saga City, Japan Steven Ray Sentinuwo 2 2 Sam Ratulangi University, Kampus Unsrat, Manado, Indonesia Abstract—Effect of driver’s awareness (e.g., to estimate the speed and arrival time of another vehicle) on the lane changing maneuver is discussed. “Scope awareness” is defined as the visibility which is required for the driver to make a visual perception about road condition and the speed of vehicle that appears in the target lane for lane changing in the road. Cellular automaton based simulation model is created and applied to simulation studies for driver awareness behavior. This study clarifies relations between the lane changing behavior and the scope awareness parameter that reflects driver behavior. Simulation results show that the proposed model is valid for investigation of the important features of lane changing maneuver. Keywords—traffic cellular automata; scope awareness; lane changing maneuver; driver perception; speed estimation I. INTRODUCTION Recent study on the traffic flow reports that the traffic congestion is influenced not only by the road capacity condition, but also by the driver behavior [1]. The other studies also found the strong relationship between the driver’ speed behavior and accidents [2]-[6]. There are two separate components which affect human factors in driving, driving skills and driving style [7]. Driving style has a direct relation to the individual drivers’ behavior. The U.S. Department of Transportation recently reported that driver behavior is leading to lane-change crashes and near-crashes [8]. In some countries, the reckless driving behaviors such as sudden-stop by public- buses, tailgating, or vehicles which changing lane too quickly also could give an impact to the traffic flow. The lane changing maneuver is one of the actions in the highway. Lane changing is defined as a driving maneuver that moves a vehicle laterally from one lane to another lane where both lanes have the same direction of travel. Lane changing maneuvers are occasionally performed in order to avoid hazards, obstacles, vehicle collision, or pass through the slow vehicle ahead. Lane changing requires high attention and visual perceptions compared to normal highway of freeway driving due to the need to continually monitor areas around the subject vehicle [9]. However, in the real traffic situations, there are some reckless drivers that change the lanes at the moment when they signal or who make “last-minutes-decision” on the road. Frequent lane changing in roadway could affect traffic flow and even lead accidents. The lane changing behaviors can be very depended on the characteristic of the driver [10]. There are some crashes of accidents typically referred to as Look-But-Fail-To-See errors because drivers involved in these accidents frequently. These are reported that they failed notification of the conflicting vehicles in spite of looking in the appropriate directions; commonly occur when drivers change lanes [25]. This means that the drivers typically use their visual perception in order to estimate the speed and the arrival time of the other vehicles before making a maneuver, e.g., lane changing maneuver. A psychology study is also reported that the accuracy level of this visual perception may lead to both failures, detect the collision and judge the crash risk (e.g., time-to-contact). From a certain distance, a short fixation may be enough to identify an approaching vehicle. If gaze duration for stimulus processing is long, then it is complicated processing while it is short for simple processing. Inaccuracy of the gazes’ duration is likely to reflect a failure to process these stimuli [26]. The Cellular Automata model of Nagel and Schreckenberg (NaSch) [12] is improved for showing effects of scope awareness that reflect drivers’ behavior when they are making a lane changing. This NaSch model has been modified to describe more realistic movement of individual vehicle when make a lane changing maneuver. Moreover, the recent study of spontaneous braking behavior [1] enhances the driver’s scope awareness behavior. The proposed model is based on NaSch model which takes into account scope of awareness and spontaneous braking in order to clarify the effects of these drivers’ behavior. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a theoretical aspect of traffic CA model. Section 3 explains the proposed model. Section 4 describes simulation process and the results in the form of fundamental diagrams and space-time diagrams. Finally, in section 5, a summary and conclusion is described with some discussions. II. TRAFFIC CELLULAR AUTOMATA MODEL One of the famous microscopic models for road traffic flow simulation is Cellular Automata (CA) model. CA model is a discrete computability mathematical model. In comparison with another microscopic model, CA model based approach is efficient [11] and is used for dynamic system simulations. CA model consists of two components, a cellular space and a set of state. The state of a cell is completely determined by its nearest neighboring cells. All neighborhood cells have the same size in the lattice. Each cell can either be empty, or is occupied by exactly one node (car in this simulation model). There is a set of local transition rule that is applied to each cell from one discrete