An Intention-driven Lane Change Framework Considering Heterogeneous Dynamic Cooperation in Mixed-traffic Environment

Qiu, Xiaoyun, Liu, Haichao, Pan, Yue, Ma, Jun, Zheng, Xinhu

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Abstract--In mixed-traffic environments, where autonomous vehicles (A Vs) must interact with diverse human-driven vehicles (HVs), the unpredictability of human intentions and heterogeneous driving behaviors poses significant challenges to safe and efficient lane change maneuvers. Existing methods often oversimplify these interactions by assuming uniform or fixed behavioral patterns. T o address this limitation, we propose an intention-driven lane change framework that integrates driving-style recognition with cooperation-aware decision-making and motion-planning. First, a deep learning-based classifier is developed to identify distinct human driving styles from the NGSIM dataset in real time. Second, we introduce a cooperation score composed of intrinsic and interactive components, which estimates surrounding drivers' intentions and quantifies their willingness to cooperate with the ego vehicle's lane change. Third, a decision-making module is designed by combining behavior cloning (BC) with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to determine whether a lane change should be initiated under current conditions. Finally, a coordinated motion-planning architecture is established, integrating IRL-based intention inference with model predictive control (MPC) to generate collision-free and socially compliant trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed intention-driven BC-IRL model achieves superior performance, reaching 94.2% accuracy and 94.3% F1-score, and outperforming multiple rule-based and learning-based baselines. In particular, it improves lane change recognition by 4-15% in F1-score, highlighting the benefit of modeling inter-driver heterogeneity via intrinsic and interactive cooperation scores.