Bayesian Calibration of the Intelligent Driver Model

Accurate calibration of car-following models is essential for understanding human driving behaviors and implementing high-fidelity microscopic simulations. This work proposes a memory-augmented Bayesian calibration technique to capture both uncertainty in the model parameters and the temporally correlated behavior discrepancy between model predictions and observed data. Specifically, we characterize the parameter uncertainty using a hierarchical Bayesian framework and model the temporally correlated errors using Gaussian processes. We apply the Bayesian calibration technique to the intelligent driver model (IDM) and develop a novel stochastic car-following model named memory-augmented IDM (MA-IDM). To evaluate the effectiveness of MA-IDM, we compare the proposed MA-IDM with Bayesian IDM in which errors are assumed to be i.i.d., and our simulation results based on the HighD dataset show that MA-IDM can generate more realistic driving behaviors and provide better uncertainty quantification than Bayesian IDM. By analyzing the lengthscale parameter of the Gaussian process, we also show that taking the driving actions from the past five seconds into account can be helpful in modeling and simulating the human driver’s car-following behaviors.