A driver assistance method for merging to increase clearness of driver decision making

As widely known, several drivers are not good at merging with traffic flow on an expressway because merging is a demanding driving task. It is considered that the difficulty of merging is due to the lack of clearness of judgment with respect to the location as to where the drivers should merge. The aim of this study included developing a mathematical model to represent driver decision making with respect to merging position and proposing a method to judge the degree of weakness during merging for a given traffic environment. Additionally, a driver assistance system is proposed to increase the clearness of judgment. The driver assistance system recommends acceleration or deceleration for the driver when the proposed model indicates that the driver experiences difficulty. The results confirmed that the proposed model estimated the merging position of a driver by performing driving in a simulator experiment. Furthermore, the findings of the driving simulator experiment verified that the driver's clearness of judgment increased when the proposed driver assistance method was used.