Sensitivity analysis of human driving characteristics on road and driving conditions for active vehicle control systems

This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of a human driver model under various road and driving conditions. With the increasing number of active vehicle control and driver-assistive systems, behaviors of human drivers are becoming more important to vehicle control, safety, and performance. As of now, these active vehicle control and driver-assistive systems are designed based on the one-size-fits-all approach with no explicit considerations or adaptations to the individual human driver characteristics variations. To further enhance the performances of such active vehicle control systems, a thorough understanding on the sensitivities of human driving characteristics to the road and driving conditions will be instrumental. In this paper, based on a human driver steering model, a sensitivity analysis was concluded to show how the driver characteristics, operating conditions, and road parameters affect the vehicle motions in given driving maneuvers. The results based on CarSim^® simulations suggest that velocity and tire-road friction coefficient are the most sensitive vehicle operating and road parameters while the human driver´s steering gain and driver preview time are the most sensitive human driving characteristic parameters in affecting the vehicle motion control performances.