Quantitative driving style estimation for energy-oriented applications in road vehicles

Energy-consumption in ground transportation systems is a major cause of CO2 emissions and related environmental concerns. A relevant part of such an energy use can be saved by devising systems that can help promoting an economical driving style. To address this challenging issue, this paper presents a method and system that allow providing a quantitative description the driving style and illustrating it to the driver by means of realtime visual feedback. The driving style assessment is based on the definition of appropriate energy-oriented cost functions that can be evaluated based on inertial measurements only, thereby providing a vehicle-independent methodology. The effectiveness of the approach, and the savings enabled by the interaction with the driver are assessed with an experimental campaign carried out on urban and extra-urban routes by different drivers.