Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics

Innovative Methods and Applications for Investigating Road User Behaviour, Traffic Safety, and Dynamics

Road user behaviour plays a fundamental role in understanding traffic dynamics, road safety, and the interactions amongst human-driven, connected, and automated vehicles. With the rapid development of advanced sensing, naturalistic driving data, connected vehicle technologies, and artificial intelligence, there is growing interest in developing new behavioural models and data-driven methods to better understand, predict, and incorporate human driving behaviour into transport analysis and control.

            Over the past decade, high-quality open-access datasets have made it possible to understand and model different aspects of driver behaviour, which remained unexplored. Some newer datasets, such as highD, INTERACTION, ZenTraffic, CitySim, and autonomous vehicle sensor data like Waymo and KITTI, allow analysing and understanding traffic patterns, behaviours, and potential hazards from the perspective of the automated vehicle itself and also allow access to labelled microscopic traffic data from different types of sources. Meanwhile, with such massive data, statistical and data-driven modelling methods have also advanced, with growing need to uncover behavioural aspects through models.

Scope

This special issue seeks to deepen our understanding of driver behaviour, traffic safety, and dynamics using a variety of high-fidelity traffic datasets and addressing emerging issues for this evolving field. Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Innovative approaches for microscopic driver behaviour modelling and prediction;
• New insights into behavioural heterogeneity and uncertainty in mixed traffic of traditional, connected, and automated vehicles;
• Physics-informed and interpretable models linking road user behaviour with traffic flow dynamics;
• Multi-source data integration/fusion for microscopic traffic safety analysis;
• Advanced approaches for crash risk analysis and risky driving behaviour recognition;
• New traffic conflict measure-empowered safety evaluation;
• Vulnerable road user safety assessment and enhancement;
• Real-time intersection safety evaluation;
• Traffic facility evaluation and its effects on safety;
• Behaviour assessment and safety–efficiency trade-offs in mixed traffic;
• Cross-dataset generalisation and reproducible datasets/benchmarks.