Extraction of Naturalistic Driving Patterns with Geographic Information Systems

A better understanding of Driving Patterns and their relationship with geographical driving areas could bring great benefits for smart cities, including the identification of good driving practices for saving fuel and reducing carbon emissions and accidents. The process of extracting driving patterns can be challenging due to issues such as the collection of valid data, clustering of population groups, and definition of similar behaviors. Naturalistic Driving methods provide a solution by allowing the collection of exhaustive datasets in quantitative and qualitative terms. However, exploiting and analyzing these datasets is complex and resource-intensive. Moreover, most of the previous studies, have constrained the great potential of naturalistic driving datasets to very specific situations, events, and/or road sections. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for extracting driving patterns from naturalistic driving data, even from small population samples. We use Geographic Information Systems (GIS), so we can evaluate drivers’ behavior and reactions to certain events or road sections, and compare across situations using different spatial scales. To that end, we analyze some kinematic parameters such as speeds, acceleration, braking, and other forces that define a driving attitude. Our method favors an adequate mapping of complete datasets enabling us to achieve a comprehensive perspective of driving performance.