Subjective Traffic Safety Experts' Knowledge for Driving-Risk Definition

Abstract

This paper presents a novelty system for the detection of driving-risk situations based on the knowledge acquired from traffic safety experts. A complete methodology to generate a driving-risk reference signal has been developed. A set of driving sessions was executed in a very realistic truck simulator, where several measures and visual information from the vehicle, the driver, and the road were collected. Two kinds of experiments were designed, i.e., controlled driving sessions (where several risk situations were induced) and natural driving sessions (where no risk situations were induced and a natural driving behavior was expected). A group of traffic safety experts from the Royal Automobile Club of Spain was consulted to evaluate the driving risk in each simulated session. The information acquired from the traffic safety experts was used to develop a methodology to combine their evaluations. The risks detected with the proposed methodology were analyzed to determine the most common human factors related with the generation of driving-risk situations.