Characterizing driver heterogeneity within stochastic traffic simulation

Abstract: Drivers' heterogeneity and the broad range of vehicle characteristics on public roads are primarily responsible for the stochasticity observed in road traffic dynamics. Understanding the behavioural differences in drivers (human or automated systems) and reproducing observed behaviours in microsimulation attracts significant attention lately. Calibration of car-following model parameters is the prevalent way to simulate different driving behaviors through randomly injected variation around average parameter values. An issue is that, as shown in the literature, most car-following model do not realistically reproduce free-flow acceleration, that is in turn highly correlated with heterogeneity in driving styles. Furthermore, often, model parameters lose their physical interpretation upon calibration. The present study proposes a novel framework to analyse observed vehicle trajectories from various drivers, identify individual driver fingerprints based on their acceleration behavior, cluster drivers in categorically-meaningful driving styles (e.g. mild, normal and aggressive) and reproduce observed individual driver acceleration behaviors in microsimulation.