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

This research effort aims to shed light upon the behaviors that drivers show during safety-critical events. The 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study conducted by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute collected useful data about such behaviors. By instrumenting automobiles for the study and allowing them to be used during normal daily routines, the data collected included normal driving and safety-critical events. This allowed the two data sets to be compared in order to ascertain 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 distinguish safety-critical event behavior as the discriminant scores of the data immediately before a safety-critical event show a deviation from normal car-following behavior.