# Evidence and quantification of cooperation of driving agents in mixed traffic flow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07297/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [The highD Dataset: A Drone Dataset of Naturalistic Vehicle Trajectories on German Highways for Validation of Highly Automated Driving Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05642/) (2018)
- [WOMD-LiDAR: Raw Sensor Dataset Benchmark for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03834/) (2023)
- [openACC. An open database of car-following experiments to study the properties of commercial ACC systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06342/) (2020)
- [A Game-Theoretic Framework for Autonomous Vehicles Velocity Control: Bridging Microscopic Differential Games and Macroscopic Mean Field Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06053/) (2019)
- [Cooperative Formation of Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic Flow: Beyond Platooning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04254/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Self-Interest and Systemic Benefits: Emergence of Collective Rationality in Mixed Autonomy Traffic Through Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04883/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cooperation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in many natural, social, and engineered systems with multiple agents. Understanding the formation of cooperation in mixed traffic is of theoretical interest in its own right, and could also benefit the design and operations of future automated and mixed-autonomy transportation systems. However, how cooperativeness of driving agents can be defined and identified from empirical data seems ambiguous and this hinders further empirical characterizations of the phenomenon and revealing its behavior mechanisms. Towards mitigating this gap, in this paper, we propose a unified conceptual framework to identify collective cooperativeness of driving agents. This framework expands the concept of collective rationality from our recent model (Li et al. 2022a), making it empirically identifiable and behaviorally interpretable in realistic (microscopic and dynamic) settings. This framework integrates mixed traffic observations at both microscopic and macroscopic scales to estimate critical behavioral parameters that describe the collective cooperativeness of driving agents. Applying this framework to NGSIM I-80 trajectory data, we empirically confirm the existence of collective cooperation and quantify the condition and likelihood of its emergence. This study provides the first empirical understanding of collective cooperativeness in human-driven mixed traffic and points to new possibilities to manage mixed autonomy traffic systems.