Modeling of Driver Cut-in Behavior Towards a Platoon

A vehicle platoon is a group of vehicles driving together with a harmonized speed and a short inter-vehicle gap by using vehicle automation and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Platoons have to share road with human-driven vehicles (HDVs) and can only be applied in heterogeneous traffic flow for a long period. Driver cut-in behavior (DCB) towards a platoon can be frequently expected in such driving context. In this paper, to understand and simulate such behavior, we propose a platoon-oriented cut-in behavior (POCB) model by fusing a lateral and a longitudinal control model into the queuing network (QN) cognitive architecture. Platoon-oriented cut-in experiments are conducted to collect driver data under cut-in from back and front scenarios, which both include six sub-scenarios with different platoon gaps or initial velocities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in simulating the DCB towards platoons by comparing experimental and simulation results under various driving scenarios across different subjects.