Fuzzy logic traffic signal controller enhancement based on aggressive driver behavior classification

The rise in population worldwide and especially in Egypt, together with the increase in the number of vehicles present serious complications regarding traffic congestion and road safety. The elementary solution towards improving congestion is to expand road capacities by building new lanes. This, however, requires time and effort and therefore new methodologies are being implemented. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) try to approach traffic congestion through the application of computational and engineering techniques. Traffic signal control is a branch of intelligent transportation systems which focuses on improving traffic signal conditions. A traffic signal controllers’ main objective is to improve this assignment in a way which reduces delays. This research proposes a new approach to enhancing traffic signal control and reducing delays of a single intersection, through the integration of an aggressive driving behavior classifier. Previous approaches dealt with traffic control and driver behavior separately, and therefore their successful integration is a new challenging area in the field. Multiple experiment sets were conducted to provide an indication to the effectiveness of our approach. Firstly, an aggressive driver behavior classifier using feed-forward neural network was successfully built utilizing Virginia Tech 100-car naturalistic driving study data. Its performance was compared against long short-term memory recurrent neural networks and support vector machines, and it resulted in better performance as shown by the area under the curve. To the best of our knowledge, this classifier is the first of its kind to be built on this 100-car study data. Secondly, a representation of aggressive driving behavior was constructed in the simulated environment, based on real life data and statistics. Finally, Mamdani’s fuzzy logic controller was modified to accommodate for the integration of the aggressive behavior classifier. The integration results were encouraging and yielded significant improvements at higher traffic flow volumes when compared against the built Mamdani’s controller. The results are promising and provide an initial step towards the integration of driver behavior classification and traffic signal control

TAE: A Semi-supervised Controllable Behavior-aware Trajectory Generator and Predictor

Trajectory generation and prediction are two interwoven tasks that play important roles in planner evaluation and decision making for intelligent vehicles. Most existing methods focus on one of the two and are optimized to directly output the final generated/predicted trajectories, which only contain limited information for critical scenario augmentation and safe planning. In this work, we propose a novel behavior-aware Trajectory Autoencoder (TAE) that explicitly models drivers' behavior such as aggressiveness and intention in the latent space, using semi-supervised adversarial autoencoder and domain knowledge in transportation. Our model addresses trajectory generation and prediction in a unified architecture and benefits both tasks: the model can generate diverse, controllable and realistic trajectories to enhance planner optimization in safety-critical and long-tailed scenarios, and it can provide prediction of critical behavior in addition to the final trajectories for decision making. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves promising performance on both trajectory generation and prediction.Comment: an updated version, change figures and references. 8 pages, robotics conference, about trajectory augmentation and prediction for intelligent vehicle system

Estimation of the optimum speed to minimize the driver stress based on the previous behavior

Proceedings of 7th International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence (ISAmI 2016), Seville, Spain on June 1st–3rdStress is one of the most important factors in car accidents. When the driver is in this mental state, their skills and abilities are reduced. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to predict stress level on a road. Prediction model is based on deep learning. The stress level estimation considers the previous driver's driving behavior before reaching the road section, the road state (weather and traffic), and the previous driving made by the driver. We employ this algorithm to build a speed assistant. The solution provides an optimum average speed for each road stage that minimizes the stress. Validation experiment has been conducted using five different datasets with 100 samples. The proposal is able to predict the stress level given the average speed by 84.20% on average. The system reduces the heart rate (15.22%) and the aggressiveness of driving. The proposed solution is implemented on Android mobile devices and uses a heart rate chest strap.The research leading to these results has received funding from the “HERMES-SMART DRIVER/CITIZEN” projects TIN2013-46801-C4-2-R /1-R funded by the Spanish MINECO, from the grant PRX15/00036 from the Ministerio de Educación Cultura y Deporte

Driver’s behavior classification in vehicular communication networks for commercial vehicles

Vehicles are becoming more intelligent and connected due to the demand for faster, efficient, and safer transportation. For this transformation, it was necessary to increase the amount of data transferred between electronic modules in the vehicular network since it is vital for an intelligent system’s decision-making process. Hundreds of messages travel all the time in a vehicle, creating opportunities for analysis and development of new functions to assist the driver’s decision. Given this scenario, the dissertation presents the results of research to characterize driving styles of drivers using available information in vehicular communication network. This master thesis focuses on the process of information extraction from a vehicular network, analysis of the extracted features, and driver classification based on the extracted data. The study aims to identify aggressive driving behavior using real-world data collected from five different trucks running for a period of three months. The driver scoring method used in this study dynamically identifies aggressive driving behavior during predefined time windows by calculating jerk derived from the acquired data. In addition, the K-Means clustering technique was explored to group different behaviors into data clusters. Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical framework necessary for the successful development of this thesis. Chapter 3 details the process of data extraction from real and uncontrolled environments, including the steps taken to extract and refine the data. Chapter 4 focuses on the study of features extracted from the preprocessed data, and Chapter 5 presents two methods for identifying or grouping the data into clusters. The results obtained from this study have advanced the state-of-the-art of driver behavior classification and have proven to be satisfactory. The thesis addresses the gap in the literature by using data from real and uncontrolled environments, which required preprocessing before analysis. Furthermore, the study represents one of the pioneering studies conducted on commercial vehicles in an uncontrolled environment. In conclusion, this thesis provides insights into the development of driver behavior classification models using real-world data. Future research can build upon the techniques presented in this study and further refine the classification models. The thesis also addresses the threats to validity that were mitigated and provides recommendations for future research

Shareable Driving Style Learning and Analysis with a Hierarchical Latent Model

Driving style is usually used to characterize driving behavior for a driver or a group of drivers. However, it remains unclear how one individual's driving style shares certain common grounds with other drivers. Our insight is that driving behavior is a sequence of responses to the weighted mixture of latent driving styles that are shareable within and between individuals. To this end, this paper develops a hierarchical latent model to learn the relationship between driving behavior and driving styles. We first propose a fragment-based approach to represent complex sequential driving behavior, allowing for sufficiently representing driving behavior in a low-dimension feature space. Then, we provide an analytical formulation for the interaction of driving behavior and shareable driving style with a hierarchical latent model by introducing the mechanism of Dirichlet allocation. Our developed model is finally validated and verified with 100 drivers in naturalistic driving settings with urban and highways. Experimental results reveal that individuals share driving styles within and between them. We also analyzed the influence of personalities (e.g., age, gender, and driving experience) on driving styles and found that a naturally aggressive driver would not always keep driving aggressively (i.e., could behave calmly sometimes) but with a higher proportion of aggressiveness than other types of drivers

Driving style recognition for intelligent vehicle control and advanced driver assistance: a survey

Driver driving style plays an important role in vehicle energy management as well as driving safety. Furthermore, it is key for advance driver assistance systems development, toward increasing levels of vehicle automation. This fact has motivated numerous research and development efforts on driving style identification and classification. This paper provides a survey on driving style characterization and recognition revising a variety of algorithms, with particular emphasis on machine learning approaches based on current and future trends. Applications of driving style recognition to intelligent vehicle controls are also briefly discussed, including experts' predictions of the future development

An object oriented Bayesian network approach for unsafe driving maneuvers prevention system

© 2017 IEEE. As the main contributor to the traffic accidents, unsafe driving maneuvers have taken attentions from automobile industries. Although driving feedback systems have been developed in effort of dangerous driving reduction, it lacks of drivers awareness development. Therefore, those systems are not preventive in nature. To cover this weakness, this paper presents an approach to develop drivers awareness to prevent dangerous driving maneuvers. The approach uses Object-Oriented Bayesian Network to model hazardous situations. The result of the model can truthfully reflect a driving environment based upon situation analysis, data generated from sensors, and maneuvers detectors. In addition, it also alerts drivers when a driving situation that has high probability to cause unsafe maneuver to be detected. This model then is used to design a system, which can raise drivers awareness and prevent unsafe driving maneuvers