A Discretionary Lane-Changing Decision-Making Mechanism Incorporating Drivers’ Heterogeneity: A Signalling Game-Based Approach

This paper attempts to propose a discretionary lane-changing decision-making model based on signalling game in the context of mixed traffic flow of autonomous and regular vehicles. The effects of the heterogeneity among different drivers and the endogeneity of same drivers in lane-changing behaviours, e.g., aggressive or conservative, are incorporated through the specification of different payoff functions under different scenarios. The model is calibrated and validated using the NGSIM dataset with a bilevel calibration framework, including two kinds of methods, genetic algorithm and perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Comparative results based on simulation show that the signalling game-based model outperforms the traditional space-based lane-changing model in the sense that the proposed model yields relatively stable reciprocal of time to collision and higher success rate of lane-changing under different traffic densities. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed to test the robustness of the proposed model, which indicates that the signalling game-based model is stable to the varying ratios of driver type.