Anticipatory Lane Change Warning using Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

Conventional lane change warning and automated lane changing systems detect other vehicles using on-board sensors such as camera, radar, and ultrasonic sensors. With the advent of Connected Vehicle (CV) technology, wireless communication (e.g., Dedicated Short Range Communications, or DSRC) becomes another option for "sensing" surrounding vehicles. In particular, DSRC does not have the line-of-sight limitation of ranging sensors and thus can "see" traffic farther ahead, which lends itself well to anticipating the movements of nearby vehicles. We have developed an algorithm that uses such data to predict whether a desired lane change will result in an unsafe situation, and prevents the lane change if that is the case. The effectiveness was evaluated in the microscopic traffic simulator VISSIM using a freeway network that has been well calibrated with rush hour traffic data. System performance in terms of safety was estimated using the Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM) under a variety of traffic scenarios (different congestion levels, penetration rates of connected vehicles and application-equipped vehicles). Preliminary tests showed that the proposed algorithm can reduce the number of potential traffic conflicts by up to 30%, with higher reductions at higher traffic volumes and higher percentages of application-equipped vehicles.