A Novel Risk Indicator for Cut-In Situations

Abstract

Cut-in situations occurs when a vehicle intentionally changes lane and ends up in front of another vehicle or in-between two vehicles. In such situations, having a method to indicate the collision risk prior to making the cut-in maneuver could potentially reduce the number of sideswipe and rear end collisions caused by the cut-in maneuvers. This paper propose a new risk indicator, namely cut-in risk indicator (CRI), as a way to indicate and potentially foresee collision risks in cut-in situations. As an example use case, we applied CRI on data from a driving simulation experiment involving a manually driven vehicle and an automated platoon in a highway merging situation. We then compared the results with time-to-collision (TTC), and suggest that CRI could correctly indicate collision risks in a more effective way. CRI can be computed on all vehicles involved in the cut-in situations, not only for the vehicle that is cutting in. Making it possible for other vehicles to estimate the collision risk, for example if a cut-in from another vehicle occurs, the surrounding vehicles could be warned and have the possibility to react in order to potentially avoid or mitigate accidents.