Real-Time Monitoring and Driver Feedback to Promote Fuel Efficient Driving
This work addresses fuel cost and environmental concerns for drivers and fleet operators, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for promoting efficient driving behaviors.
The paper tackles the problem of improving vehicle fuel efficiency by developing a real-time monitoring and feedback system that uses a random-forest classifier to detect inefficient driving behaviors and a fuzzy logic system to provide corrective actions, achieving 85.2% accuracy and up to 16.4% fuel efficiency increase.
Improving the fuel efficiency of vehicles is imperative to reduce costs and protect the environment. While the efficient engine and vehicle designs, as well as intelligent route planning, are well-known solutions to enhance the fuel efficiency, research has also demonstrated that the adoption of fuel-efficient driving behaviors could lead to further savings. In this work, we propose a novel framework to promote fuel-efficient driving behaviors through real-time automatic monitoring and driver feedback. In this framework, a random-forest based classification model developed using historical data to identifies fuel-inefficient driving behaviors. The classifier considers driver-dependent parameters such as speed and acceleration/deceleration pattern, as well as environmental parameters such as traffic, road topography, and weather to evaluate the fuel efficiency of one-minute driving events. When an inefficient driving action is detected, a fuzzy logic inference system is used to determine what the driver should do to maintain fuel-efficient driving behavior. The decided action is then conveyed to the driver via a smartphone in a non-intrusive manner. Using a dataset from a long-distance bus, we demonstrate that the proposed classification model yields an accuracy of 85.2% while increasing the fuel efficiency up to 16.4%.