Lane-Changing Trajectory Prediction Modeling Using Neural Networks

Concerning autonomous driving, lane-changing (LC) is essential, particularly within complicated dynamic settings. It is a challenging task to model LC since driving behavior is complicated and uncertain. The present study adopts a dual-layer feed-forward backpropagation neural network involving sigmoid hidden neurons and linear output neurons for evaluating intrinsic LC complexity. Furthermore, the estimation and validation of the model were performed by large-scale trajectory data. Empirical LC data were obtained from the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) project for training and testing the neural network-based LC model. The findings revealed that the introduced model could make precise LC predictions of vehicles under small trajectory errors and satisfactory accuracy. The present work assessed LC beginning/endpoints and velocity estimates by analyzing the vehicles around. It was observed that the neural network model yielded almost the same predictions as the observational LC trajectories as well as following vehicle trajectories on the original and target lanes. Furthermore, for LC behavior characteristic validation, the neural network-produced LC gap distributions underwent comparisons to real-life data, demonstrating the characteristics of LC gap distributions not to differ from the real-life LC behavior substantially. Eventually, the introduced neural network-based LC model was compared to a support vector regression-based LC model. It was found that the trajectory predictions of both models were adequately consistent with the observational data and could capture both lateral and longitudinal vehicle movements. In turn, this demonstrates that the neural network and support vector regression models had satisfactory performance. Also, the proposed models were evaluated using new inputs such as speed, gap, and position of the subject vehicle. The analysis findings indicated that the performance of the proposed NN and SVR models was higher than the model with new inputs.