A Survey on Data-Driven Modeling of Human Drivers' Lane-Changing Decisions

--Lane-changing (LC) behavior, a critical yet complex driving maneuver, significantly influences driving safety and traffic dynamics. Traditional analytical LC decision (LCD) models, while effective in specific environments, often oversimplify behavioral heterogeneity and complex interactions, limiting their capacity to capture real LCD. Data-driven approaches address these gaps by leveraging rich empirical data and machine learning to decode latent decision-making patterns, enabling adaptive LCD modeling in dynamic environments. In light of the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the demand for data-driven models oriented towards connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of data-driven LCD models, with a particular focus on human drivers' LC decision-making. It systematically reviews the modeling framework, covering data sources and preprocessing, model inputs and outputs, objectives, structures, and validation methods. This survey further discusses the opportunities and challenges faced by data-driven LCD models, including driving safety, uncertainty, as well as the integration and improvement of technical frameworks. Compared to car-following (CF) behavior, LC behavior entails higher collision risks due to its dependency on holistic evaluations of traffic conditions in both the original and target lanes, requiring drivers to navigate multi-criteria decision-making processes. More specifically, safe LC execution necessitates gaps in the target lane to satisfy collision-avoidance criteria. Drivers must continuously monitor the real-time states of surrounding vehicles (e.g., velocity, acceleration) and adjust their LC maneuvers in response to unexpected behavioral changes (e.g., sudden deceleration, lane encroachment). Human drivers' irrational decision-making (e.g., sudden risk-preference shifts) in dynamic environments pose challenges to traditional LC models based on hypothesis of rational man. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72288101, 72171018, 72242102). D.-F Xie is with the School of Systems Science, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China (e-mail: dfxie@bjtu.edu.cn). L. Li is with the Department of Automation, BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. He is with Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139, the United States (e-mail: he.zb@hotmail.com) This effort will provide critical support for trustworthy traffic simulations, dynamic traffic management, and LC decision-making of autonomous vehicles (A Vs).