A Game Model of Lane Changing for Bus Exiting in a Connected Environment

The research on connected vehicles has attracted much interest of governments and research institutions in these days. As researchers who have been deeply intrigued, we are particularly interested in investigating the lane changing issues of connected buses when exiting bus stops. In order to examine the utilities of both the buses and social vehicles in a connected environment, we employ the game theory to analyze the interactions between them. A two-player, non-cooperative, non-zero-sum game model was built in this paper. We analyzed 5 different scenarios for bus exiting at bus bay stops and curbside bus stops. The payoffs considered in the game model were mainly from the perspective of safety and time. Besides the commonly studied safety issues caused by collisions, we supplement the existing literature by adding on non-collision injuries caused by improper driving behaviors (e.g. excessive acceleration). Moreover, unlike the lane changing game between two social vehicles, bus, as one of the dominant players in the game, carry more passengers and its impact on traffic delays cannot be neglected in the payoff of the time. According to the payoff functions, we deduced the Nash equilibrium solutions for the game between the connected bus and the connected social vehicle. The Nash equilibria in different conditions are analyzed. It is verified that the Nash equilibrium solutions obtained with the changes in parameters in the model is in accordance with the logic of rational players. The model proposed in this paper can provide reliable supports in terms of the lane changing behaviors for bus exiting in a connected environment.