A Framework for Testing Independence Between Lane Change and Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System

Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) are being deployed in several cities around the world. Researchers are preparing for the largest Field Operational Test (FOT) in Australia to evaluate C-ITS safety benefits. Two of the safety benefit hypotheses they formulated assume a dependency between lane changes and C-ITS warnings displayed on the Human Machine Interface (HMI) during safety events. Lane change detection is done by processing many predictors from several sensors at the time of the safety event. However, in their planned FOT, the participating vehicles are only equipped with the vehicle C-ITS and the IMU. Therefore, in this paper, they propose a framework to test lane change and C-ITS dependency. In this framework, they train a random forest classifier using data collected from the IMU to detect lane changes. Consequently, the random forest output probabilities of the testing data in case of C-ITS and control are used to construct a 2×2 contingency table. Then they develop a permutation test to calculate the null hypothesis needed to test the independence of the lane change during safety events and the C-ITS.