Human driver models are needed as a replacement for real test drives to control simulated vehicles in simulated environments. Since the recent past they have been used particularly in regard to testing driver assistance systems.
The company HFC has worked for several years on the development of “human-like” driver models. In a modular approach, human driving behavior is simulated at different levels of complexity on the basis of Simulink and Stateflow. The modules include human cognition, situational awareness, decision-making and task-execution. For example, human similarity in the execution level is realized by taking into account context-dependent time delays or the link between steering and regulation strategies. Furthermore, we modeled the influencing factors such as individual characteristics, types of drivers and driver states. Therefore every driver can drive with a unique strategy.
The module concept with the different modeling levels is presented in the picture below.