An Ecolevel Estimation Method of Individual Driver Performance Based on Driving Simulator Experiment

Abstract

Accurately acquiring the ecolevel of individual driver performance is the precondition for more targeted ecodriving behavior optimization. Because of obvious advantage in mining hidden relationship, machine learning was adopted to explore the complicated relationship between driver performance and vehicle fuel consumption and thus to predict the ecolevel of individual driver performance in this study. Based on driving simulator tests, data of driver performance and vehicle fuel consumption were collected. The ecolevel was indicated as the ecoscore corresponding to vehicle fuel consumption. The model input was designed as 10 feature indexes of driver performance (e.g., percentage number, mean value, standard deviation, and power of applying acceleration pedal). The output was treated as ecoscore. Taking a number of one hundred of data segments in vehicle starting process as training sample, the optimal structure, functions, and learning rate of a backpropagation neural network model with three layers were obtained, after repeated model simulation experiments. The validation test of 16 sample data items showed that the mean prediction accuracy of our developed model was 92.89%. In addition, comparative analysis displayed that the performance of backpropagation neural network based model was better than linear regression based model and random forest based model, from the aspects of elapsed time and prediction accuracy in estimating the ecolevel of driver performance. The study results provide an effective method to grasp the ecolevel of driver performance and further contribute to driving behavior optimization towards vehicle fuel consumption and emissions reduction.