Driving Behavior and the Aging Society: A Framework for Microsimulation Approach

In Japan, the rapidly aging society requires a special perspective in traffic engineering to address the occurrence of severe traffic accidents involving elderly drivers. The route to incorporate the behavior of elderly drivers into traffic analysis, and to assess the benefits of emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles to this growing social group, must contemplate the proper representation of elderly drivers´ driving behavior in analysis tools such as microsimulation. This paper introduces exploratory research to identify the attributes required to accomplish the representation of elderly drivers in microsimulation models.