Multi-vehicle interaction safety of connected automated vehicles in merging area: A real-time risk assessment...

The risky lane-changing manoeuvre of vehicles often occurs at expressway entrances, which would result in a high crash risk in the freeway system and significantly impact its safety. The highly anticipated environment of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is expected to reduce the associated crash risk of lane changing by offering various types of driving support, which utilise surrounding traffic information. The modelling crash risk under the environment of CAV driving during mandatory lane changing in merging areas faces new challenges due to the novelty of CAVs and subsequent shortage of data. To explore such risk situation of multi-vehicle interaction at expressway entrances, this study proposed a supervised learning algorithm and a Bayesian hierarchical model to assess risk levels and predict the probability of risk occurrence at different risk levels of interactive vehicles in real time of mandatory driving behaviour during the merging process. The learning algorithm, based on XGBoost, was exploited to classify risk levels. The Bayesian hierarchical model was used to analyse the probability of real-time risk comprising vehicle physical state layer, multi-vehicle interaction layer and risk probability layer. The probabilistic model parameters were calibrated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Gibbs sampling method. The K-fold cross validation method was used to validate the proposed model of risk level. The probabilistic model validity was tested through posterior prediction of P-value. The quantitative risk estimation of CAVs through a few merging cases was conducted. Results show that the identification accuracy of slight, low, moderate and high risk is 94.24%, 85.82%, 84.16% and 79.69%, respectively. The P-value of Durbin-Watson's posterior, normal hypothesis, test distribution symmetry and kurtosis are all close to 0.5. Therefore, the method of real-time risk assessment is convergent and has good fitting. This research can promote cautious driving behaviours and provide reference for driver's decision making in the long term under the environment of CAVs.