Tuning Collision Warning Algorithms to Individual Drivers for Design of Active Safety Systems

Every year, many people are killed and injured in highway traffic accidents. In order to reduce such casualties, collisions warning systems has been studied extensively. These systems are built by taking the driver reaction times into account. However, most of the existing literature focuses on characterizing how driver reaction times vary across an entire population. Therefore, many of the warnings that are given turn out to be false alarms. A false alarm occurs whenever a warning is sent, but it is not needed. This would nagate any safety benefit of the system, and could even reduce the overall safety if warnings become a distraction. In this paper, we propose our solution to address the described problem; First, we briefly describe our method for estimating the distribution of brake response times for a particular driver using data from a Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) system. Then, we investigate how brake response times of individual drivers can be used in collision warning algorithms to reduce false alarm rates while still maintaining a high level of safety. This will yield a system that is overall more reliable and trustworthy for drivers, which could lead to wider adoption and applicability for V2V/V2I communication systems. Moreover, we show how false alarm rate varies with respect to probability of accident. Our simulation results show that by individualizing collision warnings the number of false alarms can be reduced more than 50%. Then, we conclude safety applications could potentially take full advantage of being customized to an individual's characteristics.