Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Southern African Transport Conference 7-10 July 2014 "Leading Transport into the Future", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.
Naturalistic driving and field operational tests are used worldwide to collect data from
drivers in order to better understand the human, vehicle and environment interactions. The
fairly new methodology has already provided great insight into numerous driver behaviours
that could previously not be observed directly. The data is collected with a data acquisition
system which is installed in the vehicle. This system consists of cameras facing the driver
(and passengers) as well as cameras facing outward. An on-board computer is installed in
the vehicle and collects information about the vehicle. This information includes satellite
positions, data and time as well as speed and acceleration and deceleration data. The
system collects large volumes of data and the challenge is to manage this data efficiently
as currently the datasets take-up much storage space, are in different formats
necessitating that different software programs be used to download, transcribe and
analyse the data. This paper provides an overview of the challenges experienced while
working with these large data sets as well as some of the possible solutions identified. The
findings and recommendations from this study should prove useful to other researchers
and practitioners interested in working with naturalistic data.
