Intelligent Driver Management

In continuation to my last blog, I would like to discuss more about the driver management side of the intelligent transport system. A fellow road safety consultant replied to my blog, saying that he is more concerned about the human errors which can happen in an autonomous vehicle environment. Interestingly, that is the other side of the story. More and more driverless vehicles are coming to the roads and there could be a clash between driver driven cars and autonomous cars. We, humans are highly prone to errors and machines are almost perfect. Imagine a driver, who is drunk/sleepy driving a car on a highway, where driverless cars are plying. This situation can be a bit complicated. We don't have to wait for so long, to see the results of this situation. Driver evaluation is the need of the hour to make sure that we all are safe on roads. Apart from human errors, there are possibilities of physical illness, purposeful negligence, drunken driving, which are not identified, unless some serious accidents happen. This is a very tricky situation. We need to prevent those drivers, who are not fit to drive a vehicle, at least a public transport vehicle. What is the possibility? Intelligent vehicle management system has a capability of analyzing the driver behavior, and categorize them on basis of their driving skills. Thinture has a system which can sense the harsh braking, harsh acceleration, turn angle, over speeding, off-road driving of a vehicle. The other inputs like indicators, head lights and horn can be integrated. Imagine, a vehicle which is having many harsh braking and harsh accelerating events happened on a single day, we can very well consider a reckless driving pattern. Continuous usage of horn, not using indicators on turns, taking fast turns are all check points to be considered. Once we create a location based geo-marking for the city areas, we can check whether the head lights are in dipped position or not. All these instances can be linked to a driver, whose bio-metric details are required to start the engine, and analyze his/her performance. A high risk (RED) driver can be permanently blocked from driving a public transport vehicle, after a few months of initial evaluation. A medium risk category driver (YELLOW) should be given a training regarding the best driving practices, before they drive again. The performance can be monitored for a given period and reconsider their status. The Green category drivers should be awarded and should be given the first priority for driving public transport vehicles. Earlier, when we have very few vehicles on roads, road safety was a less important subject. Now, times have changed, and we need to do serious research on road safety. The sensor support systems can help the drivers to drive safely, but the attitude and skill of a driver is the most important part of creating safer roads. We would like to hear your views on this subject..