Car-following behavior is the result of the interaction of various elements in the specific driver-vehicle-environment aggregation. Under the intelligent and connected condition, the information perception ability of vehicles has been significantly enhanced, and abundant information about the driver-vehicle-environment factors can be obtained and utilized to study car-following behavior. Therefore, it is necessary to comprehensively take into account the driver-vehicle-environment factors when modeling car-following behavior under intelligent and connected conditions. While there are a considerable number of achievements in research on car-following behavior, a car-following model with comprehensive consideration of driver-vehicle-environment factors is still absent. To address this gap, the literature with a focus on car-following behavior research with consideration of the driver, vehicle, or environment were reviewed, the contributions and limitations of the previous studies were analyzed, and the future exploration needs and prospects were discussed in this paper. The results can help understand car-following behavior and the traffic flow characteristics affected by various factors and provide a reference for the development of traffic flow theory towards smart transportation systems and intelligent and connected driving.

The application of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology has resulted in the traffic environment being different from how it was in the past. In the V2X environment, the information perception ability of the driver–vehicle unit is greatly enhanced. With V2X technology, the driver–vehicle unit can obtain a massive amount of traffic information and is able to form a connection and interaction relationship between multiple vehicles and themselves. In the traditional car-following models, only the dual-vehicle interaction relationship between the object vehicle and its preceding vehicle was considered, making these models unable to be employed to describe the car-following behavior in the V2X environment. As one of the core components of traffic flow theory, research on car-following behavior needs to be further developed. First, the development process of the traditional car-following models is briefly reviewed. Second, previous research on the impacts of V2X technology, car-following models in the V2X environment, and the applications of these models, such as the calibration of the model parameters, the analysis of traffic flow characteristics, and the methods that are used to estimate a vehicle’s energy consumption and emissions, are comprehensively reviewed. Finally, the achievements and shortcomings of these studies along with trends that require further exploration are discussed. The results that were determined here can provide a reference for the further development of traffic flow theory, personalized advanced driving assistance systems, and anthropopathic autonomous-driving vehicles.

The type of vehicles in realistic traffic systems are not homogeneous. Impacts of the preceding vehicle’s type on the car-following behavior, fuel consumption and exhaust emissions are still unclear. This paper presents a study on the impacts of two types of preceding vehicles, heavy vehicles and new energy vehicles, on car-following behavior, traffic flow characteristics, fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. Firstly, an extended car-following model was proposed by incorporating the influence of the preceding vehicle’s type. Secondly, impacts of the preceding vehicle’s type on platoon stability were analyzed by applying linear stability theory. Finally, numerical simulations were carried out to analyze impacts of the preceding vehicles’ type on the characteristics of the car-following platoon, traffic flow operation, and vehicle’s fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. The results reveal that, compared with the normal preceding vehicle, there are negative impacts of the heavy and new-energy preceding vehicles on the platoon stability, traffic flow operation, and vehicle’s fuel consumption and exhaust emissions, and these impacts are related to the corresponding sensitivity parameters and the penetration percentages of the two types of preceding vehicle. The research results of this paper can provide a reference for understanding car-following behavior and traffic-flow characteristics affected by the type of preceding vehicles in the V2X environment.

Global route planning has garnered global scholarly attention as a crucial technology for ensuring the safe navigation of intelligent ships. The comprehensive influence of time-varying factors such as water depth, prohibited areas, navigational tracks, and traffic separation scheme (TSS) on ship navigation in coastal global route planning has not been fully considered in existing research, and the study of route planning method from the perspective of practical application is still needed. In this paper, a global route planning method based on human-like thinking for coastal sailing scenarios is proposed. Based on the historical route’s information, and taking into full consideration those time-varying factors, an abnormal waypoint detection and correction method is proposed to make the planned route conform to relevant regulations of coastal navigation and the common practices of seafarers as much as possible, and better meet the coastal navigation needs of unmanned ships. Taking the global route planning of “ZHIFEI”, China’s first autonomous navigation container ship, as an example, the validity and reliability of the proposed method are verified. Experimental findings demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in global route planning for coastal navigation ships. The method offers a solid theoretical foundation and technical guidance for global route planning research of unmanned ship.

Traffic lights detection and recognition (TLDR) is one of the necessary abilities of multi-type intelligent mobile platforms such as drones. Although previous TLDR methods have strong robustness in their recognition results, the feasibility of deployment of these methods is limited by their large model size and high requirements of computing power. In this paper, a novel lightweight TLDR method is proposed to improve its feasibility to be deployed on mobile platforms. The proposed method is a two-stage approach. In the detection stage, a novel lightweight YOLOv5s model is constructed to locate and extract the region of interest (ROI). In the recognition stage, the HSV color space is employed along with an extended twin support vector machines (TWSVMs) model to achieve the recognition of multi-type traffic lights including the arrow shapes. The dataset, collected in naturalistic driving experiments with an instrument vehicle, is utilized to train, verify, and evaluate the proposed method. The results suggest that compared with the previous YOLOv5s-based TLDR methods, the model size of the proposed lightweight TLDR method is reduced by 73.3%, and the computing power consumption of it is reduced by 79.21%. Meanwhile, the satisfied reasoning speed and recognition robustness are also achieved. The feasibility of the proposed method to be deployed on mobile platforms is verified with the Nvidia Jetson NANO platform.

The visual attention system is the gateway to the human information processing system, and emotion is an important part of the human perceptual system. In this paper, the driver’s visual attention characteristics and the influences of typical driving emotions on those were explored through analyzing driver’s fixation time and identification accuracy to different visual cognitive tasks during driving. The results showed that: the increasing complexity of the cognitive object led to the improvement of visual identification speed. The memory and recall process increased drivers’ fixation time to cognitive objects, and the recall accuracy decreased with the increase in time interval. The increase in the number of cognitive objects resulted in the driver improving the visual identification speed for the cognitive object at the end of the sequence consciously. The results also showed that: the visual cognitive efficiency was improved in the emotional states of anger and contempt, and was decreased in the emotional states of surprise, fear, anxiety, helplessness and pleasure, and the emotional state of relief had no significant effect on the visual cognitive efficiency. The findings reveal the driver’s visual information processing mechanism to a certain extent, which are of great significance to understand the inner micro-psychology of driver’s cognition.