Modelling Driver Behaviour in the Case of Failures in a Steer-by-Wire System

In the design and development of advanced vehicle control systems such as X-by-Wire (XBW), system safety is a crucial aspect. Failures in XBW can easily result in accidents. Therefore, methods and tools are needed to ensure fault-tolerant systems. Quantifying the consequence of an error is far from trivial, since the consequence is determined not only by the vehicle and the XBW system, but also by the driver’s response. This chapter describes a driver model for the case of a Steer-by-Wire system. A rather good match between the model and the experimental results from a driving simulator study could be obtained for all configurations considered. The resulting model can be used to predict driver’s response to tasks, similar to the type of failure tasks considered here, providing a useful method to answer a variety of design questions related to fault-tolerant system design.