Impacts of advanced driver assistance systems on commercial truck driver behaviour performance using naturalistic data

Abstract

Traffic crashes tend to be more serious when commercial trucks are involved. And an increasing number of commercial vehicles are equipped with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for traffic safety improvement. To this end, this study investigated the impacts of ADAS with respect to forward collision warning (FCW), urban forward collision warning (UFCW), lane departure warning (LDW), headway monitoring and warning (HMW), and speed limit indicator (SLI) on commercial truck drivers' behaviours using naturalistic data. Participants experienced two different test scenarios with two different ADAS warning configurations: Visual and audio alerts in the inactive state and in the active state. After activating alerts, 62%, 35%, 69%, 81% and 73% of drivers received less warnings in terms of FCW, UFCW, LDW, HMW and SLI respectively; the average of FCW, UFCW, LDW, HMW and SLI respectively declined 22%, 13%, 28%, 45% and 15%, but median changed little except for LDW and HMW. Then, the further analysis results by the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) method revealed that all warnings except UFCW had positive effect on commercial truck drivers' behaviour performance. The findings provide important references for commercial truck driver training and supervision in the age of advanced technology.