Fuel used by heavy duty trucks is a major cost for logistics companies, and therefore improvements in this area are highly desired. Many of the factors that influence fuel consumption, such as the road type, vehicle configuration or external environment, are difficult to influence. One of the most under-explored ways to lower the costs is training and incentivizing drivers. However, today it is difficult to measure driver performance in a comprehensive way outside of controlled, experimental setting.

This paper proposes a machine learning methodology for quantifying and qualifying driver performance, with respect to fuel consumption, that is suitable for naturalistic driving situations. The approach is a knowledge-based feature extraction technique, constructing a normalizing fuel consumption value denoted Fuel under Predefined Conditions (FPC), which captures the effect of factors that are relevant but are not measured directly.

The FPC, together with information available from truck sensors, is then compared against the actual fuel used on a given road segment, quantifying the effects associated with driver behavior or other variables of interest. We show that raw fuel consumption is a biased measure of driver performance, being heavily influenced by other factors such as high load or adversary weather conditions, and that using FPC leads to more accurate results. In this paper we also show evaluation the proposed method using large-scale, real-world, naturalistic database of heavy-duty vehicle operation.

Understanding and quantifying drivers’ influence on fuel consumption is an important and challenging problem. A number of commonly used approaches are based on collection of Accelerator Pedal Position - Engine Speed (APPES) maps. Up until now, however, most publicly available results are based on limited amounts of data collected in experiments performed under well-controlled conditions. Before APPES maps can be considered a reliable solution, there is a need to evaluate the usefulness of those models on a larger and more representative data.

In this paper we present analysis of APPES maps that were collected, under actual operating conditions, on more than 1200 trips performed by a fleet of 5 Volvo trucks owned by a commercial transporter in Europe. We use Gaussian Mixture Models to identify areas of those maps that correspond to different types of driver behaviour, and investigate how the parameters of those models relate to variables of interest such as vehicle weight or fuel consumption.

Improving the performance of systems is a goal pursued in all areas and vehicles are no exception. In places like Europe, where the majority of goods are transported over land, it is imperative for fleet operators to have the best efficiency, which results in efforts to improve all aspects of truck operations. We focus on drivers and their performance with respect to fuel consumption. Some of relevant factors are not accounted for inavailable naturalistic data, since it is not feasible to measure them. An alternative is to set up experiments to investigate driver performance but these are expensive and the results are not always conclusive. For example, drivers are usually aware of the experiment’s parameters and adapt their behavior.

This paper proposes a method that addresses some of the challenges related to categorizing driver performance with respect to fuel consumption in a naturalistic environment. We use expert knowledge to transform the data and explore the resulting structure in a new space. We also show that the regions found in APPES provide useful information related to fuel consumption. The connection between APPES patterns and fuel consumption can be used to, for example, cluster drivers in groups that correspond to high or low performance. © 2017 IEEE