Highly automated vehicles (HAVs) have been introduced to the transportation system for the purpose of providing safer mobility. Considering the expected long co-existence period of HAVs and human-driven vehicles (HDVs), the safety operation of HAVs interacting with HDVs needs to be verified. To achieve this, HAVs' Operational Design Domain (ODD) needs to be identified under the scenario-based testing framework. In this study, a novel testing framework aiming at identifying the Safety performance boundary (SPB) is proposed, which assures the coverage of safety-critical scenarios and compatible with the black-box feature of HAV control algorithm. A surrogate model was utilized to approximate the safety performance of HAV, and a gradient descent searching algorithm was employed to accelerate the search for SPB. For empirical analyses, a three-vehicle following scenario was adopted and the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) was tested as a case study. The results show that only 4% of the total scenarios are required to establish a reliable surrogate model. And the gradient descent algorithm was able to establish the SPB by identifying 97.42% of collision scenarios and only false alarming 0.29% of non-collision scenarios. Furthermore, the concept of safety tolerance was proposed to measure the possibilities of boundary scenarios dropping in safety performance. The applications of helping to construct ODD and compare different control algorithms were discussed. It shows that the IDM performs better than the Wiedemann 99 (W99) model with larger ODD.@en

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are being introduced to the traffic system with the promise of improving current traffic status. However, the empirical data also indicate contrary effects with estimated higher crash rate and change of crash patterns. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the driving behavior of AVs and human-driven vehicles (HDVs) in real mixed traffic. Current studies have analyzed the driving behavior of AVs and HDVs, as well as behavioral adaptations of drivers of HDVs based on empirical data. While they play an important role in traffic systems, signalized intersections have not been studied sufficiently in this context. Therefore, this study aims to utilize the Waymo open dataset to characterize and quantify the behavioral differences of AVs and HDVs at signalized intersections. Five parameters of driving behavior related to signalized intersections were characterized according to five critical maneuver phases, which were identified by wavelet transform and threshold-based method. Statistically significant differences in driving behavior between AVs and HDVs were found, from three categorized situations: vehicle approaching the red light/queue, vehicle responding to the green light (as the first vehicle), and vehicle responding to its preceding vehicle (in the queue). Further, behavioral adaptations of HDV drivers were revealed in that they tended to keep closer to the stopped AVs in a queue and to react more strongly to AV start-up maneuvers when the traffic light turns to green.@en