Initial Scene Configurations for Highway Traffic Propagation

Validation of automotive safety systems can be done by simulating millions of driving traces. It is important that the distribution of initial scenes for these driving traces be as representative of reality as possible so that safety risk can be estimated accurately. This paper presents a methodology for constructing probability distributions over initial highway scenes from which samples can be drawn for safety evaluation through simulation. A method for automated model construction based on a Bayesian statistical framework is introduced and applied to the NGSIM Highway 101 and Interstate 80 datasets. Four models of increasing complexity and fidelity are developed. A complete implementation is available online.