An Improved Car-Following Model by Considering Angry Driving with Fuzzy Inference

Driver's emotions are one of the core factors that affect the running characters of vehicle which also impacts the traffic safety. Moreover, of all the driver's emotions, angry driving is the most evident. However, in general, angry driving is rarely considered into traditional car-following models. In this paper, an improved car-following model that considers angry driving is proposed. First, the theory of Weibull distribution is used to calibrate the definite desired time headway whose scope were already acquired from ten groups of on-road experiments to reflect the drivers' emotions. Then, the fuzzy inference was adopted to establish the new car-following model because of its indetermination and fuzzy characteristics of the driving process such as drivers' subjective judgments, reasoning and decision making. Finally, the new model under special scenery has been simulated in Matlab/Simulink. The simulation results indicate that (1) the angrier the following driver is, increases the rate of acceleration or deceleration the following car moves at, which means the driver adopts more excessive range of vehicle operation, (2) The relative distance away from the front car is larger when the following car decelerates while smaller when accelerates under angry driving than that of normal driving.