Detection and Mitigation of Safety Critical Lane Changes in Partially-Connected Vehicles

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is an emerging technology which enables vehicles to share data, facilitating functions such as traffic information service, collision warning or cooperative control to potentially increase throughput and enhance road safety. However, the benefits of V2V communication during the early stages of market penetration, where communicating and non-communicating vehicles are co-existing, are not yet clear. This paper aims at quantifying the relationship between the penetration ratio of communicating vehicles and the additional safety that can be achieved thereby. We design a rule-based method for early detection of aggressive lane change behaviors using communicated motion data and evaluate its effectiveness according to different penetration ratios and traffic scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a proactive countermeasure which can be applied to mitigate the disruptive impact of erratic lane changes and analyze its performance in case different number of vehicles implement the measure. The results from a microscopic traffic simulator indicate that in partially-connected traffic, anomalies such as abrupt lane changes even of non-connected cars can be detected by observing the response of the following vehicles. In addition, by applying pre-braking as a countermeasure, traffic safety can be improved in terms of surrogate safety measures (SSM),