Overview
In recent years, a variety of driver support and information management systems have been designed and implemented with the objective of improving safety as well as the performance of vehicles. While the crucial issues at a technical level have been mostly solved, their consequences on driver activity remains open and needs to be fully explained. Of particular importance are their effects on driver behaviour and strategies, and their impact on the operation and safety of the traffic system.
The objective of ITERATE was to develop and validate a unified model of driver behaviour (UMD) and driver interaction with innovation technologies in emergency situations. This model will be applicable to, and validated for, all the surface transport modes. Drivers age, gender, education and experience and culture (whether regional or company/organisational) are factors that will be considered together with influences from environment and the vehicle.
Such a unified model of driver behaviour will be of great use when designing innovative technologies since it will allow for assessment and tuning of the systems in a safe and controllable environment without actually putting them to use in real traffic.
At the concept stage, the model will guide designers in identifying potential problem areas whilst at the prototype stage, the model could inform on the scenarios to be used in system evaluation. In this way the systems will be better adapted to the drivers before being available on the market and will provide better support to the driver in emergency situations. Along the same lines, the model could be of use for authorities as a guide in assessing and approving innovative technologies without performing extensive simulator experiments or large-scale field trials.
ITERATE was based on the assumption that the underlying factors influencing human behaviour such as age, gender, culture etc. are constant between transport modes. This assumption allows a unified model of driver behaviour, applicable to all surface transport modes, to be developed. This was done within ITERATE and the model can be used to improve design and safety assessment of innovative technologies and make it possible to adapt these technologies to the abilities, needs, driving style and capacity of the individual driver. The model will also provide a useful tool for authorities to assess ITS which is missing today.
Funding
Results
The proposed simulation tool has been developed and completed. The results obtained from the analyses show among others that:
- it is possible to unify the behavioural processes of surface vehicle drivers, with a set of formulations that can be adapted to the specific mode of transport, while maintaining the same modelling architecture;
- several simulation runs have been performed, making use of generic values to the coefficients that affect the essential variables characterising driver behaviour. The results of these runs have shown reasonable responses of drivers in terms of speed, braking and/or accelerating in reaction to specific demands of traffic and environment, etc.;
- as far as the capability of the simulation platform to adapt to the results of the experiments, only the automotive environment has been analysed;
- results were obtained from two case studies where different behaviours have been studied. In particular:
- different national cultures have been simulated and drivers with a variety of personal characteristics have been considered;
- two specific tasks have been analysed, namely a 'cruise' and 'car following' conditions, which enabled the evaluation of behaviour of different drivers;
- the findings, support the main hypothesis that behavioural performance in different surface transport domains can be assimilated and therefore the same formulations developed for the automotive domain can be utilised for the rail environment;
- results showed that the simulation tool is able to reproduce the results of the experiments. However, the results of the case studies seem (especially in terms of maximum intended Speed) slightly unrealistic relative to common sense expectations of real drivers.
Innovation aspects
Development and validation of driver behaviour modelling and driver interaction modelling with innovation technologies in emergency situations.
Other results
The behavioural performance in different surface transport domains (e.g. rail environment) can also be analysed, with this simulation tool.
Strategy targets
An efficient and integrated mobility system: Acting on transport safety (saving thousands of lives)
Innovating for the future (technology and behaviour): A European Transport Research and Innovation Policy