Overtaking trajectory assessment utilizing data from driving simulator

The paper investigates vehicle’s passing paths from the road-engineering point of view, with special emphasis on the two pairs of consecutive reverse curved sections at the beginning and ending phase of the passing maneuver respectively. The authors by examining these curved paths intend to quantify their trajectories and define potential safety violation imposed from the vehicle acceleration performance. The assessment is based on a driving simulator experiment as well as a vehicle dynamics model, where a realistic representation of the passing task with respect to roadway’s posted speed and the ability of the passing (examined) vehicle to perform such maneuvers is examined. The curved paths were determined for two different and mostly typical posted speed values (70km/h and 90km/h), where the impeding (passed) vehicle was assumed to travel under steady state conditions (20km/h below the respective posted speed values). The authors, besides the geometry of the curved passing paths, investigate respective critical parameters, such as headway and lateral distances, and assess their potential implementation in terms of safety by examining conflict points and acceleration performance. In view of the imminent vehicle automation, although more advanced communication between vehicles or between vehicles and road environment seems a prerequisite in order integrated guidance during passing maneuvers to be enabled, the present research addresses mainly cases where only the passing vehicle can be automated (the impeding vehicle conventional). For the examined conditions, the research is an opening paradigm of how the passing process can be standardized and therefore deployed in existing ADAS.