Sensitivity analysis of human driving characteristics on road and driving conditions for active vehicle control systems

This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of a human driver model under various road and driving conditions. With the increasing number of active vehicle control and driver-assistive systems, behaviors of human drivers are becoming more important to vehicle control, safety, and performance. As of now, these active vehicle control and driver-assistive systems are designed based on the one-size-fits-all approach with no explicit considerations or adaptations to the individual human driver characteristics variations. To further enhance the performances of such active vehicle control systems, a thorough understanding on the sensitivities of human driving characteristics to the road and driving conditions will be instrumental. In this paper, based on a human driver steering model, a sensitivity analysis was concluded to show how the driver characteristics, operating conditions, and road parameters affect the vehicle motions in given driving maneuvers. The results based on CarSim^® simulations suggest that velocity and tire-road friction coefficient are the most sensitive vehicle operating and road parameters while the human driver's steering gain and driver preview time are the most sensitive human driving characteristic parameters in affecting the vehicle motion control performances.