Wissam Kontar

Wissam Kontar, Xinzhi Zhong, Soyoung Ahn

This paper describes a framework for learning Automated Vehicles (AVs) driver models via knowledge sharing between vehicles and personalization. The innate variability in the transportation system makes it exceptionally challenging to expose AVs to all possible driving scenarios during empirical experimentation or testing. Consequently, AVs could be blind to certain encounters that are deemed detrimental to their safe and efficient operation. It is then critical to share knowledge across AVs that increase exposure to driving scenarios occurring in the real world. This paper explores a method to collaboratively train a driver model by sharing knowledge and borrowing strength across vehicles while retaining a personalized model tailored to the vehicle's unique conditions and properties. Our model brings a federated learning approach to collaborate between multiple vehicles while circumventing the need to share raw data between them. We showcase our method's performance in experimental simulations. Such an approach to learning finds several applications across transportation engineering including intelligent transportation systems, traffic management, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Code and sample dataset are made available at the project page https://github.com/wissamkontar.

Mohammad Elayan, Wissam Kontar

Transportation systems have long been shaped by complexity and heterogeneity, driven by the interdependency of agent actions and traffic outcomes. The deployment of automated vehicles (AVs) in such systems introduces a new challenge: achieving consensus across safety, interaction quality, and traffic performance. In this work, we position consensus as a fundamental property of the traffic system and aim to quantify it. We use high-resolution trajectory data from the Third Generation Simulation (TGSIM) dataset to empirically analyze AV and human-driven vehicle (HDV) behavior at a signalized urban intersection and around vulnerable road users (VRUs). Key metrics, including Time-to-Collision (TTC), Post-Encroachment Time (PET), deceleration patterns, headways, and string stability, are evaluated across the three performance dimensions. Results show that full consensus across safety, interaction, and performance is rare, with only 1.63% of AV-VRU interaction frames meeting all three conditions. These findings highlight the need for AV models that explicitly balance multi-dimensional performance in mixed-traffic environments. Full reproducibility is supported via our open-source codebase on https://github.com/wissamkontar/Consensus-AV-Analysis.