Exploring Fuzzy Logic and Random Forest for Car Drivers’ Fuel Consumption Estimation in IoT-Enabled Serious Games

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have a promising potential for instructional serious games related to field operations. We explore IoT’s potential for serious games in the automotive application domain to improve driving, choosing fuel consumption (FC) as an indicator of the driver performance as it is strongly influenced by driving styles and can be quantified and validated. We propose a FC prediction model, exploiting three vehicular signals that are controllable by the driver (player), that are able to provide direct coaching feedback to the driver and are easily available through the widely available On-Board Diagnostic-II (OBD-II) vehicular interface: throttle position, engine rotation speed (RPM) and car speed. We processed the data with two techniques, random forest (RF) and fuzzy logic (FL). Implementation, training and testing of both models, were made using the enviroCar database which freely provides a significant amount of naturalistic drive data. Results show that RF achieves quite a higher estimation accuracy, which complements FL’s ability to provide driver with easily understandable feedback. We thus argue that the combination of the two models can supply valuable information usable by game designers in the automotive environment.