An integrated lane change prediction model incorporating traffic context based on trajectory data

Predicting lane change maneuvers is critical for autonomous vehicles and traffic management as lane change may cause conflict in traffic flow. Most existing studies do not consider the effect of traffic context (i.e., traffic level and vehicle type) on lane change maneuvers. Therefore, these models cannot adapt to different traffic environments. This study aims to address this problem and establish an integrated lane change prediction model incorporating traffic context using machine learning algorithms. In addition, lane change decisions and lane change trajectories are both predicted to capture the whole process, which have been less studied. The framework of the proposed model contains two parts: the traffic context classification model, which is used to predict traffic level and vehicle type, and the integrated lane change prediction model, which is used to predict lane change decision with XGBoost and lane change trajectories with LSTM incorporating context information. Instead of considering lane change, we establish trajectory prediction models for left lane change and right lane change, further improving the prediction accuracy. The naturalistic trajectories of the highD dataset are used to train and validate the model. The results show that the proposed model improves the accuracy from 97.02% to 98.20% when predicting lane change decision that incorporate traffic context. In addition, the MSE decreases from 11.21 to 6.62 when predicting trajectories. The proposed models are also validated on NGSIM dataset, proving the adaptability of the model. The proposed model can be applied to different environments to reduce collision risks caused by lane change maneuvers and improve traffic management and driving safety.