Onboard Monitoring System Project
Nominated for 2007 Best of ITS
Onboard Monitoring and Reporting for Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Project nominated for "Best of ITS: Research and Innovation"
California PATH, California Department of Transportation, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration - Onboard Monitoring and Reporting for Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety
Presented by ITS America, the Best of ITS Awards is the only program in the world that honors the most innovative, effective, and influential achievements in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) industry. This highly competitive program recognizes the organizations whose projects have demonstrated specific and measurable outcomes and exemplified innovation by establishing a "new dimension" of performance.
The project will also be demonstrated at the ITS Showcase.
FMCSA Truck Onboard Monitoring System - A Freightliner Century Class truck and trailer will drive the local area for about 10 to 12 minutes collecting data. On returning from driving the local area the truck would enter the "safe lane" and accelerate smoothly to 10 MPH. The truck would cross the Portable Virtual Weigh Station and then decelerate to a stop. Data from the Onboard Monitoring System will be sent to the Exposition Hall booth to be displayed and analyzed. This display will also be duplicated under the shade tent beside the safe lane. The truck will then leave the parking lot display area, drive around for 10 to 12 minutes to collect new data, and return to repeat the cycle.
One of eight traffic fatalities results from collisions involving large trucks, amounting to more than 5,000 deaths a year and underscoring that reduction of commercial motor vehicle (CMV) crashes should be an essential element of highway safety. In 71-percent of truck-involved crashes with multiple vehicles, police assign error to passenger vehicle drivers. However, CMV driver error is still a major causal factor to truck-involved crashes. Consider that:
- A loaded tractor-trailer requires 20-40-percent further stopping distance than a car. This situation is worsened with downgrades and wet pavement
- Crashes involving trucks are more likely to involve serious injuries or fatalities than are crashes involving only passenger vehicles.
- Over a 10-year span (1992 to 2002) there has been a 31-percent increase in registered large trucks and a 40-percent increase in miles traveled by large trucks
One means to lower the amount of CMV driver errors is to improve driver performance through CMV Onboard monitoring systems, coupled with appropriate feedback to the driver. Onboard monitoring may provide a mechanism to encourage good driving behavior by recognizing and correcting self-induced hazardous driving situations.
The original effort was a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Cooperative Agreement with Caltrans, which has turned into an active University of California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) project Onboard Monitoring and Reporting for Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety (OBMS). The OBMS project resulted in an implemented and tested prototypical suite of hardware on a Freightliner Century Class tractor, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Vehicle Used for OBMS Prototype Integration
In the OBMS prototype development work, the monitored parameters and the type of feedback to be given was systematically examined by first looking at commercial vehicle crash causes and from that deriving eleven topics which as a whole comprise the feature set recommendations for an ideal onboard driver monitoring system.
The work performed began with an examination of the literature on large truck crash causation and used a reverse FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) to identify a list of eleven key ideas which could potentially be linked to safety and monitored by an onboard system. However, this list, shown below, was a first pass as it is diverse and some parameters are linked, whereas others are not. As an example, hard braking incidents (a maneuver) could be interpreted as a sign of a lack of attention.
- Monitoring Vehicle Speed
- Monitoring Following Distance
- Monitoring Attention
- Monitoring Hard Braking/Steering Incidents
- Monitoring Lane Position
- Monitoring Lane Changes
- Monitoring and Recording Incidents
- Monitoring Fatigue
- Monitoring Hours of Service
- Monitoring Behaviors at Intersections
- Monitoring Other Vehicle Parameters
After the initial Phase 1 investigation, one of the proposed items on the list, monitoring behaviors at intersections (list item 10), was deemed currently not technically feasible. The remaining ten list items were collapsed into five core behavioral categories, list items 1, 2, 3, 8, and 11. These were carried forth in the OBMS prototype system described in Table 1.
Table 1. Summary of Potential OBMS Functions, Sensor Suites, and Driver Feedback
Two types of feedback are envisioned to be provided by the system: real-time and off-line. Examples of the types of feedback that could be provided by the system are described in the last two columns of Table 1. In the generic sense, the real-time feedback consists of visual and auditory alerts, warnings, and other information provided to the driver at the time of the event. The feedback could range from warnings of an imminent threat such as a forward collision or lane departure warning to simply informing the driver that an incident has been triggered and the system and cameras are recording it. Extensive real-time feedback is best given for conditions that are immediately correctable by the driver; however, given driver preference for real-time feedback, most of the monitored parameters are envisioned to be captured by some form of real-time feedback.
The second type of feedback provided by the system is categorized as off-line or delayed feedback. All of the monitored behaviors should provide some sort of summary metrics or statistics which can be viewed by both the driver and his fleet management.
Additionally, the off-line feedback should make any incidents available for review. The exact nature of the off-line feedback program may depend on inputs from the carrier, since the carrier's corporate culture, current practices, and available resources will likely influence the design of any such program. The program could call for driver self-review, management review, or both. Comparisons of the off-line summary metrics may be made both across drivers and across time (to chart individual driver improvement).
Real time feedback is provided via audio channel and via a surrogate instrument cluster displayed on a 7-inch LCD screen, as illustrated in Figure 2. In that figure, the suggested speed limit for the given road surface and curvature is the portion of the circular speedometer gauge below the red arc. The suggested safe following distance feedback, modified by the prevailing road surface condition (and for this function, by the sensed 'field' of other forward vehicles), is the color and size of the vehicle shown at the bottom of the surrogate cluster. In this instance, the vehicle is colored green; when following too closely for prevailing conditions, the vehicle changes to yellow, then red and grows or looms. Also, beneath the green vehicle icon is the car following gap, given in seconds. Finally, the "driver ID", "HOS [hours of service] remaining" and "Alertness Index" are also provided as direct feedback of a prototypical digital tachometer and also a drowsiness/alertness warning which supplements that subsystem's COTS-based feedback.
Figure 2. Depiction of OBMS Driver Feedback
This idea of investigating this promising OBMS prototype for safety benefit - that is, monitoring driver behaviors and providing both real time and off-line feedback - with a participating carrier and drivers under real operating conditions forms the background and basis for a subsequent Field Operational Test (FOT).
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