Project

A large body of research, including in-depth accident analysis as well as naturalistic driving studies, has identified driver inattention as one of the leading causes of road crashes. Driver inattention relates to a wide range of specific factors such as distraction, daydreaming, "looked-but-failed-to-see", fatigue/drowsiness, alcohol and drug impairment. A key problem is that a commonly agreed taxonomy of such factors, as well as precise definitions of the factors themselves, is currently lacking. This makes it difficult to compare and aggregate results from different studies and obtain reliable estimates of the relative importance of different inattention-related factors in crash causation. The targeted taxonomy should be applicable to traditional in-depth crash data as well as naturalistic driving data. However, it should be noted that naturalistic data will always be far more detailed than crash data. Thus, one possibility is to create a hierarchical taxonomy so that the top levels apply to both crash data and naturalistic data, and the lower levels allow for a more precise classification based on the more detailed description available from naturalistic driving.