A Parameter Analysis on RSS in Overtaking Situations on German Highways

As automated vehicles are expected to significantly reduce the number of fatalities in road traffic, ensuring their safety is one of the most critical challenges in the industry today. The Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) concept is a step towards this goal. RSS formalizes reasonable boundaries for the foreseeable worst-case behavior of traffic participants by defining clear mathematically proven rules. All parameters used in RSS have a physical meaning and are thus well understandable, but the values of these parameters have a crucial effect on the applicability of this approach. Choosing too conservative parameter values may impact traffic flow, while the opposite could lead to uncomfortable or potentially unsafe driving behavior. While a majority of work concentrated on the longitudinal use case, in this work we focus on finding reasonable parameter values for lateral safety. We propose scopes and parameter sets for the RSS minimum lateral distance extracted from human driving behavior that allow for a comfortable driving behavior while not hindering traffic flow.