Study on an Evaluation Method of Coincident Timing Skill of Driver Based on Driving Behavior Model of Brake Operation

Abstract

Traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers have become an important social issue in Japan. The primary factor of traffic accidents by elderly drivers is a reduction in their driving skill. In this case, in order to assist operation of driver whose driving skill is reduced, the system must be able to evaluate his driving behavior skill. In this paper, we propose a evaluation method of driver's driving skill. Here, coincident timing skill is focused on. A driver decides an execution timing of his operation based on prediction of time series change of situation around him. When execution timing of operation of the driver has the widely variability in spite of the same driving scene, it is considered that he have a reduced ability to drive vehicle. This magnitude of variability of execution timing of operation of driver is defined as coincident timing skill of the driver. In this paper, in order to evaluate this coincident timing skill, a driving behavior modeling technique is applied. Driving behavior model is used to predict driver's operation. And we have proposed a driving behavior modeling method to predict driver's operation. In our method, the execution timing of driver's operation is modeled by probability model. Therefore, our model has the potential to evaluate the driver's coincident timing skill by analyzing this probability model. According to the above viewpoint, we propose a evaluation method of coincident timing skill based on our driving behavior model. In the experiment, the driving behavior models of brake operation with difference execution timing are generated. Then, the results that the difference of each coincident timing skills is evaluated quantitatively based on the proposed method are shown.