Citation

Kita H, Fukuyama K. Transp. Traffic Theory 1999; 14: 173-187.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, Publisher varies)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Driving behavior between merging and through cars on an on-ramp merging section of an expressway is a case where bi-directional influence plays a dominant role in driving actions. A model was developed for describing the traffic behavior of a couple of merging and through cars while explicitly taking into consideration the interaction between them. The situation is viewed as a game in which each of the drivers chooses their best action by considering his/her forecast of the other driver's action. The study then clarifies the mechanism under which the traffic phenomena, such as the merging and/or giveway ratio over lanes, are determined by the driving environments consisting of road and traffic characteristics and the driving decisions of other surrounding cars. However, the study does not necessarily investigate the existence of multiple equilibria and the transition of equilibria, so that the correspondence between the driving conditions as input and the chosen driving actions as output is not unique. It is shown that a unique correspondence can be found between a certain driving environment and a pair of the resultant driving actions of the drivers as an equilibrium solution of the game, allowing the possibility of examining the replication ability of the model based on observation data. An earlier version of the model is extensively refined in order to specify the timing and location of driving actions corresponding to the initial conditions, by analyzing the equilibria of the game, especially transition along time. A case study is presented.