Impact of Driver Behavior on Fuel Consumption: Classification, Evaluation and Prediction Using Machine Learning

Driving behavior has a large impact on vehicle fuel consumption. Dedicated study on the relationship between the driving behavior and fuel consumption can contribute to decreasing the energy cost of transportation and the development of the behavior assessment technology for the ADAS system. Therefore, it is vital to evaluate this relationship in order to develop more ecological driving assistance systems and improve the vehicle fuel economy. However, modeling driving behavior under the dynamic driving conditions is complex, making a quantitative analysis of the relationship between the driving behavior and the fuel consumption difficult. In this paper, we introduce two kinds of machine learning methods for evaluating the fuel efficiency of driving behavior using the naturalistic driving data. In the first stage, we use an unsupervised spectral clustering algorithm to study the macroscopic relationship between driving behavior and fuel consumption, using the data collected during the natural driving process. In the second stage, the dynamic information from the driving environment and natural driving data is integrated to generate a model of the relationship between various driving behaviors and the corresponding fuel consumption features. The dynamic environment factors are coded into a processable, digital form using a deep learning-based object detection method so that the environmental data can be linked with the vehicle's operating signal data to provide the training data for the deep learning network. The training data are labeled according to its fuel consumption feature distribution, which is obtained from the road segment data and historical driving data. This deep learning-based model can then be used as a predictor of the fuel consumption associated with different driving behaviors. Our results show that the proposed method can effectively identify the relationship between the driving behavior and the fuel consumption on both macro and micro levels, allowing for end-to-end fuel consumption feature prediction, which can then be applied in the advanced driving assistance systems.