Naturalistic driving data : managing and working with large databases for road and traffic management research

Abstract

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.