Modeling Driver Response to Lead Vehicle Decelerating

This paper presents a driver performance map of braking and steering in response to three driving scenarios that lead to rear-end crashes. This map encompasses low risk, conflict, near-crash, and crash imminent driving states that correspond to advisory warning, crash imminent warning, and crash mitigation functionalities for intelligent vehicle rear-end crash countermeasures. Specifically, this paper models driver response to a lead vehicle decelerating by building upon prior research that estimated the state boundaries for driver response to lead vehicle stopped or moving at slower constant speed. In addition, this paper compares braking performance to steering performance in the lead vehicle-decelerating scenario using plots of range and range-rate that roughly quantify the boundaries between the driving conflict states. Driver performance is also discussed among the three rear-end crash scenarios.