Assessment and Profiling of Driving Style and Skills

Abstract

Although all drivers have in common the task of safe driving, as individuals, they are all unique. Each driver’s uniqueness depends on his or her driving skills and behavior, learning experiences, collision history, stress management, cultural environment, and consequently different expectations and judgments. The fact that these antecedents can be divided into more (e.g., culture, personality) as well as less stable driver characteristics (e.g., fatigue, stress), adds to the complexity of predicting driving performance and safety. In this chapter we report on methods and different approaches for the segmentation of driver types according to common response strategies in driving and the corresponding driver behavior model. The described exploratory data analysis reveals relationships between psychophysical, biometrical and neuropsychological factors and driving characteristics. We also explain how individual drivers react in different situations, and how stress and high cognitive workload impact driving performance as well as how this knowledge enables the profiling of drivers into different clusters based on their driving skills and styles.