Developing a New Driver Assistance System for Overtaking on Two-Lane Roads using Predictive Models

The complexity of an overtaking maneuver on two-lane roads merits a thorough method for developing an assistance system to prevent accidents, thus reducing the number of fatalities and the associated economic costs. This research aims to introduce a new Driver Overtaking Assistance System (DOAS). This system is based on the proactive prediction of the possibility of overtaking any preceding vehicle(s) both accurately and safely. To provide a comprehensive system, different factors related to the driver, the vehicle, the road, and the environment which have an impact on the maneuver have been taken into consideration. In addition to considering the main overtaking strategies including accelerative, flying, piggybacking, and the 2+. The proposed system is a vehicle-based safety system based on the collection of contextual information from the driving vicinity through Hello beacon messages and a set of sensors that are used as part of the reasoning process of the context-aware architecture to safely initiate the overtaking maneuver. A classification model was implemented for both the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning algorithms. A vehicle driving simulator STISIM Drive® was used to conduct driving experiments for 100 participants of different ages, gender, and levels of mental awareness. The results obtained from the DOAS show high accuracy in aiding a safe overtaking maneuver. The classification model shows promising results in the predictions, through perfect accuracy and a very low level of outcome errors.