Human-Automated Vehicle Interactions: Voluntary Driver Intervention in Car-following
A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Soyoung (Sue) Ahn
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sue Ahn's research is concerned with the behavior of voluntary driver interventions in automated vehicles in car-following, initiated by the driver in non-safety-critical situations rather than by the system. Specifically, the study she discusses analyzes the dynamic process of voluntary driver intervention through evidence accumulation (EA) modeling, which describes the evolution of the driver's distrust in automation, ultimately resulting in intervention. The model is calibrated using data from a driving simulator experiment. The experimental data also suggests that driver interventions can instigate substantial traffic disturbances that are amplified through upstream traffic. Based on the findings, we develop a car-following control for AVs by embedding the calibrated EA model in a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed control can effectively mitigate unnecessary driver interventions while improving traffic stability.
SPEAKER
Soyoung (Sue) Ahn is a Professor and an Associate Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also an Executive Director for Mid-America Freight Coalition. She is an expert in analysis and modeling of human-driven and connected automated vehicle flow, and traffic control using emerging technologies. Her research involves 1) understanding the fundamental characteristics of various traffic flow phenomena through observation and modeling, 2) linking those traffic phenomena to individual driver/vehicle characteristics, and 3) applying this knowledge to develop vehicle and traffic control strategies using emerging technologies such as the connected autonomous vehicle technology. Ahn is a chair of the Operations Section for the Transportation Research Board (TRB). She is also a Senior Editor for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and Transportation Research Record, and an Editorial Board Editor for Transportation Research Part B. She is an elected member of the International Advisory Committee for the International Symposium on Traffic and Transportation Theory.