Potential of Highly Automated Vehicles for Monitoring Fatigued Drivers and Explaining Traffic Accidents on Motorway Sections

Abstract

The near-future deployment of high-level automation vehicles (AVs) can render promising opportunities to solve ongoing hindrances in modern safety-related research. Monitoring fatigued drivers on any road section is one of these challenges. Vehicle trajectory big data, monitored through AVs, include key information with which to monitor fatigued drivers on roads. To mine this upcoming opportunity, a new data-driven approach which allows the direct monitoring of fatigued drivers on road segments is proposed here for the first time. A feasible study was conducted using big vehicle trajectory data and real-life traffic accident data. The results showed that fatigued drivers on a target road section can be successfully surveyed using the driving durations from departure locations to the target road section. It was found that, with a statistical correlation of 0.90, an index for fatigued drivers has strong explanatory power about the traffic accident rate. This finding indicates that the proposed method will be a promising means by which to monitor fatigued drivers at road locations in the upcoming era of autonomous vehicles. In addition, the method is immediately practicable if vehicle trajectory data are available.