Eva Michelaraki defended her Phd thesis on improving driver safety tolerance zone, October 2024
This PhD thesis was carried out at the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens under the supervision of Professor George Yannis.
The objective of this PhD thesis was to improve driver Safety Tolerance Zone (STZ) through a holistic analysis of road, vehicle and behavioural risk factors. More specifically, the impact of task complexity and coping capacity on crash risk was examined. Towards that end, data from 190 drivers who participated in a large on-road and simulator driving experiment were exploited. An innovative methodology, consisting of both statistical analyses (Generalized Linear Models, Structural Equation Models) and machine learning techniques (Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbors, Neural Networks, Random Forests) has been developed. SEMs demonstrated that task complexity was positively correlated with risk, indicating that driving during night-time or in adverse weather conditions can exacerbate the challenges posed by complex tasks. Conversely, coping capacity was negatively correlated with risk, indicating that drivers with higher coping capacity are better equipped to handle challenging driving situations. Results indicated that RF models outperformed the DT and kNN models across all metrics, making it the most effective for predicting speeding and headway, with overall accuracy up to 90%. Lastly, it was observed that both real-time and post-trip interventions had a positive effect on driving behaviour, as drivers managed to improve their performance.
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