Accelerated Evaluation of Automated Vehicles in Lane Change Scenarios

It is important to rigorously and comprehensively evaluate the safety of Automated Vehicles (AVs) before their production and deployment. A popular AV evaluation approach is Naturalistic-Field Operational Test (N-FOT) which tests prototype vehicles directly on public roads. Due to the low exposure to safety-critical scenarios, N-FOTs is time-consuming and expensive to conduct. Computer simulations can be used as an alternative to N-FOTs, especially in terms of generating motions of the surrounding traffic. In this paper, we propose an accelerated evaluation approach for AVs. Human-controlled vehicles (HVs) were modeled as disturbance to AVs based on data extracted from the Safety Pilot Model Deployment Program. The cut-in scenarios are generated based on skewed statistics of collected human driver behavior, which amplifies riskier testing scenarios while reserves its statistical information so that the safety benefits of AV in non-accelerated cases can be accurately estimated. An AV model based on a production vehicle was tested. Results show that the proposed method can accelerate the evaluation process by at least 100 times.