Onboard Monitoring and Reporting for Commercial Vehicle Motor Safety

This final report describes the process and product from the project, Onboard Monitoring and Reporting for Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety (OBMS), in which a prototypical suite of hardware on a Freightliner Century Class truck was developed and tested. The OBMS suite allows for online measurement of a set of driving characteristics which are indicators of unsafe driving behavior. These characteristics include speed, following distance, lane keeping performance, safety belt use, and the use of turn signals. Feedback can be provided to the driver, either directly via real time feedback or through carrier management, to allow drivers to significantly improve their safety performance. For example, if a driver receives a report that he/she is not using his/her turn signals during lane changes, that driver can then be monitored during a follow up period to determine if feedback had corrected the deficiency. This concept would be pioneered in commercial fleets because they have the resources and organizational structure to provide feedback and training to professional drivers. This concept differs from commercial onboard devices in that it is an ensemble set of instruments – not one or a few warning devices – with a safety focus and different feedback modalities. It is comprehensive in that it addresses crash causes and provides ‘corrective’ feedback in real time and/or post-trip feedback, depending on the particular subsystem(s) which are activated. In essence, the objective is to improve and maintain driver safety behaviors. Thus, it does not explicitly address fleet management or other non-safety operations, for example vehicle location and tracking or fuel economy. A systems engineering process was applied to this research, resulting in a prototypical OBMS hardware suite and a plan to follow up this effort with a FOT. This project is the result of a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Cooperative Agreement with Caltrans, it was undertaken by the California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) program, with assistance from the California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT) and a subcontractor, Advanced Systems Engineering Consulting.