Development of a test regime for safety assessment of in-vehicle information systems : A validation study

Abstract: The present validation study was performed at Volvo Technology within the European project called HASTE (Human Machine Interface And the Safety of Traffic in Europe, Project GRD1/2000/25361 S12.319626). The aim of HASTE was to develop a common test regime for the safety assessment of In- Vehicle Information Systems (IVIS). The idea was to create a test regime possible to use both for vehicle and system manufacturers during the actual development as well as for final verification and certification of systems to be introduced or already introduced to the market. Within HASTE a range of studies were carried out during the project both in field as well as in simulated environments. The Volvo study was carried out in real traffic in the Gothenburg surroundings in parallel with 9 other validation studies at project partners in six different countries. Four different In-Vehicle Information Systems were assessed. Different tasks were selected for the assessment with regards to input and output modality as well as task length. Based on the results from the current experiment a set of measures suitable for capturing inattention in a driving environment was recommended. The most promising ones were ‘subjective rating of driving performance’, ‘high frequency steering’, ‘percent road centre’, ‘pdt hit rate’ and ‘pdt response time’. These measures were shown to be sensitive to different difficulty levels among tasks. However, further work in how to interpret the results with regards to actual road safety will be needed.