Modeling Car-Following Behaviors and Driving Styles with Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning

Building a human-like car-following model that can accurately simulate drivers’ car-following behaviors is helpful to the development of driving assistance systems and autonomous driving. Recent studies have shown the advantages of applying reinforcement learning methods in car-following modeling. However, a problem has remained where it is difficult to manually determine the reward function. This paper proposes a novel car-following model based on generative adversarial imitation learning. The proposed model can learn the strategy from drivers’ demonstrations without specifying the reward. Gated recurrent units was incorporated in the actor-critic network to enable the model to use historical information. Drivers’ car-following data collected by a test vehicle equipped with a millimeter-wave radar and controller area network acquisition card was used. The participants were divided into two driving styles by K-means with time-headway and time-headway when braking used as input features. Adopting five-fold cross-validation for model evaluation, the results show that the proposed model can reproduce drivers’ car-following trajectories and driving styles more accurately than the intelligent driver model and the recurrent neural network-based model, with the lowest average spacing error (19.40%) and speed validation error (5.57%), as well as the lowest Kullback-Leibler divergences of the two indicators used for driving style clustering.