Abstract: Motor vehicles work in the complex and highly dynamic driving environment, with the information uncertainty of onboard sensors, so the correct situation assessment of dynamic environment is one of the key factors to the safety of motor vehicles, in particular, intelligent vehicles. In this paper, the mechanism of autonomous line-change decision-making for intelligent vehicle is studied based on environment situation assessment. Firstly a hierarchy analysis on vehicle environment situation assessment model is conducted based on human driving cognitive mechanism. Then the dynamic Bayesian network is used to fulfill situation assessment, and autonomous line-change decision-making is achieved with the principle of maximum expected utility. Finally, the effectiveness of the method proposed is verified by experiments. The results show that the method proposed can make correct and reasonable decision for lane change under complex dynamic environment and the condition of information uncertainty such as measured data deviation of onboard sensors

Key words: intelligent vehicles, autonomous lane change decision, situation assessment, dynamic Bayesian network, maximum expected utility