Complex traffic situations and high driving workload are the leading contributing factors to traffic crashes. There is a strong correlation between driving performance and driving workload, such as visual workload from traffic signs on highway off-ramps. This study aimed to evaluate traffic safety by analyzing drivers’ behavior and performance under the cognitive workload in complex environment areas. First, the driving workload of drivers was tested based on traffic signs with different quantities of information. Forty-four drivers were recruited to conduct a traffic sign cognition experiment under static controlled environment conditions. Different complex traffic signs were used for applying the cognitive workload. The static experiment results reveal that workload is highly related to the amount of information on traffic signs and reaction time increases with the information grade, while driving experience and gender effect are not significant. This shows that the cognitive workload of subsequent driving experiments can be controlled by the amount of information on traffic signs. Second, driving characteristics and driving performance were analyzed under different secondary task driving workload levels using a driving simulator. Drivers were required to drive at the required speed on a designed highway off-ramp scene. The cognitive workload was controlled by reading traffic signs with different information, which were divided into four levels. Drivers had to make choices by pushing buttons after reading traffic signs. Meanwhile, the driving performance information was recorded. Questionnaires on objective workload were collected right after each driving task. The results show that speed maintenance and lane deviations are significantly different under different levels of cognitive workload, and the effects of driving experience and gender groups are significant. The research results can be used to analyze traffic safety in highway environments, while considering more drivers’ cognitive and driving performance.

Side collisions caused by sudden vehicle cut-ins comprise a significant proportion of traffic accidents. Due to the complex and dynamic nature of traffic environments, the warning algorithms in advanced driving assistant systems (ADAS) often misjudge and misdiagnose risk and omit necessary warnings, because they rely solely on the sensing information of the single vehicle equipped with ADAS and have limited insights from and communication with the surrounding vehicles and traffic environment. To improve the effectiveness of ADAS in cut-in scenarios, this study established a collision warning model in a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication environment. Firstly, based on the support vector machine-recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) lane-change intent-recognition model, the lane-change feasibility and the change rate of the lateral offset, the logical ``and'' was used to establish a lane-change behavior prediction model, and a trajectory prediction model was established based on the long short-term memory (LSTM). Then, based on the proposed comprehensive prediction model for lane-change behavior, the driving trajectory prediction model, and the oriented bounding box (OBB) detection algorithm, a collision warning model was established for a V2V environment. Finally, based on a driving simulation platform and a real-world vehicle test, a cut-in experiment in a V2V environment was designed and implemented. By comparing the warning confusion matrix and warning time, it was found that the proposed cut-in collision warning model is superior to the traditional collision warning model. The results of this study can provide new modeling ideas and a theoretical basis for ADAS to further optimize for a cut-in scenario.

In conditionally automated driving, due to the possible system limits, the driver is required to take-over the vehicle control if a so-called take-over request is issued. This study investigates the effect of scenarios and secondary tasks on the take-over performance and safety. The experiment was conducted in a real vehicle-based driving simulator. The manual driving, the 1-back cognitive secondary task and the letter game task were tested. Participants experienced three different traffic scenarios, including a non-critical scenario and two critical scenarios. Results indicated the scenarios and secondary tasks impacts taking-over characteristics; at the meanwhile, a strong influence of the take-over time and driver’s workload on the take-over safety. Specifically, the steering reaction was generally slower than the braking reaction, indicating that the lateral operation requires more cognitive and decision-making time. In extreme cases, the braking operation is not sufficient to ensure safety and the steering operation must be taken into account. When obstacles are not easy to detect, or when the driver is engaged in a visual secondary task, the steering reaction time increases significantly. This study can provide data support for take-over safety evaluation of conditionally automated driving.