Identification of warning signs in truck driving behavior before safety-critical events

This research effort aims to distinguish between safety critical event behavior and normal car-following behavior. The Naturalistic Truck Driving Study conducted by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute collected very useful data in this regard. By instrumenting trucks and allowing them to be used in normal daily routines, the data collected included normal driving as well as safety critical events. This allows the two to be compared to find any differences. A discriminant analysis was used for this task which resulted in interesting results when analyzing the data immediately before safety critical events for two drivers. The discriminant analysis resulted in a way to “predict” events as the discriminant scores of the data immediately before a safety critical event show a deviation from normal car following behavior.