Monitoring vehicle driving and usage: experiences and perspectives

The vehicle driving, usage and operating conditions are studied in many contexts through vehicle instrumentation and real-world monitoring. We review a large range of European and American experiences in that field, which concern the definition of mission profiles (vehicle and component design), of driving cycles (fuel consumption and emission measurements), but also safety, mobility or traffic research studies. These experiences demonstrate the high capacities and performances of the techniques and the strong concern of many actors in studying the actual vehicle driving and usage. However due to the large range of objectives, experiments are separately conducted by numerous laboratories, often with restricted means and limited samples of vehicles, and without synergy and experience sharing. It would be probably useful to federate efforts on such a topic and conduct larger experiments with several objectives. We also examine different techniques such as GPS for the vehicle localization, the use of the OBD vehicle network to scan easily numerous operation parameters, and data loggers for the data collection and transmission. From this synthesis, we establish a typology of the questions addressed by the different domains of investigation (driver behavioural studies, traffic research, mobility, energy and environment related work, data collection for the vehicle conception) and the possible experimental approaches. We finally outline a rough frame for a project that should imply interested actors and would be oriented to a light and low-cost instrumentation and monitoring of a large sample of vehicles.