trucks on highway

Industry Leading Driver Scoring for Commercial Vehicles in India

Bala Santhanam and Sean Lawrence, Intel® Onboard Fleet Services Engineering

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We see ratings on almost every service we use, but applying that concept to transportation and logistics is difficult. Why we score and what we want to do with it defines how we use it. 

The vehicle fleet and drivers are the assets that power the business. The logistics industry relies on transporters to offer timely end to end shipment and safety of the goods transported to the consignor. For this industry, the primary reason to score the drivers is to incentivize good driving and to remove stress from the driver during implementation. If we do this successfully, it will automatically increase driver retention. 

Both ADAS (Advanced Driver Assist System) and DMS (Driver Monitoring System) technologies serve the purpose of being the third eye in the vehicle, enhancing driver efficiency. While doing this, we capture the metadata generated by the devices to profile the driver by coming up with a driver score. Alerts generated over a period—and the driver’s ability to learn from it—will result in safer driving. This will lead to improvement in driver performance, which will be indicated by the improved scores.

Remember, each alert is not a penalty! It is meant to assist the driver.

Driver Scoring with Intel® Onboard Fleet Services

Intel® Onboard Fleet Services has a portfolio of devices focusing on safety and efficiency. We can score the driver according to the alert data generated by each device and each class of devices. For example, our digital twin FMS (Fleet Management System) device alerts will help generate a score that corresponds to operational efficiency. The ADAS (Advanced Driver Assist System) and DMS (Driver Monitoring System) device help us in generating a safety score for the driver (combining on road and in-cabin safety behaviors).

Depending on the configuration selected by the fleet customer, Intel Onboard Fleet Services generates safety and efficiency scores using a weighted scoring algorithm based on the data received from different classes of devices. Intel Onboard Fleet Services also calculates a composite score that helps to rank and incentivize the drivers.

How does it work and what is unique?

Most of our customers’ business is directly connected to making a successful trip or trips. This is true for both people and good carriers. How the fleet/logistics business defines a trip is industry specific. Each trip is driven by one or more drivers. So, the notion of a safety or efficiency score of both the trip and driver are important. 

Most of the driver scoring algorithms in use today are focused on ‘telematics alerts' such as hard acceleration, hard braking, and cornering. Intel Onboard Fleet Services is unique in multiple ways. First, we have devices that are based in computer vision, so it is far more relevant for scoring. Secondly, Intel and Mobileye have two decades of experience improving accuracy. By deploying 100 million devices on the road, we provide an advantage over competitors on the alerts themselves. Finally, India level driver population data baselines give us the ability to offer even the smallest fleet accurate scoring that relates to the country level data.

Intel Onboard Fleet Services builds a baseline using anonymized data from drivers across all vehicles covered by us. This builds a data baseline at the driver population scale of the country! Note that the baseline keeps improving by virtue of technology adoption, as well as incentivization of good behavior.

We then normalize the data for a particular driver by distance and/or duration and apply our patented method for weighted scoring. The weighted scoring method is fine-tuned for prevailing driving conditions in India. This makes it more representative of a driver's driving habits. Ability to disaggregate the composite score and look at various components of the score (provided the fleet has selected the right set of devices for the cabin will help the fleet to focus on accurate messaging to the driver. 

Culture of Safety: How can you make it work for your fleet?

Operators can decide on their own cadence to monitor their drivers (weekly, fortnightly, or monthly). Intel® Onboard Fleet Services provides a variety of views beginning with a simple top 10, bottom 10 views all the way to detailed analysis of driver score. This helps fleets to focus on the fleet as a whole as well as an individual driver and particular interventions needed. 

Habits are hard to change once acquired. Studies show that new habits form better with the right incentivization and nudges on time. Intel® Onboard Fleet Services arms you with all the data a fleet needs to set up the right incentivization to continuously improve driving and reduce accidents. Our driver app (launching soon) will keep the drivers informed on how he/she did at the end of every trip and will nudge them towards better driving with tips and training materials.

What is next?

We are constantly improving our scoring and investigating ways to deploy our scoring to professional driver training centers and institutes. Further, we are researching the GIS (Geographic Information System) data layers coming from our ADAS device to offset infrastructure-related impact on driving, making the driver score fair for the driver. 

Stay connected to learn about our breakthroughs in the use of technology for road safety.