Patent ID: 8573978

Claim:
A driving evaluation system for evaluating whether a driver's driving of a vehicle complies with driving evaluation parameters set for a road on which the driver is driving, and retroactively correcting the evaluation when the evaluation parameters are invalid because a characteristic of the road had changed before the evaluation and the evaluation parameters had not been updated to reflect the change, the system comprising: a memory that stores: map data including: a plurality of nodes that represent a plurality of intersections and a plurality of links connecting the nodes that represent sections of roads; and road characteristic information indicating characteristics of the links; driving evaluation parameters set for the links, the driving evaluation parameters being based on the road characteristic information and being usable to evaluate whether predetermined driving actions are complied with; and evaluation information collected during driving of the vehicle in the past indicating whether the driver complied with the driving evaluation parameters set for particular links, the particular links being constituent components of the roads on which the driver has driven, the evaluation information for each particular link including evaluation timestamp data indicating a time at which the evaluation information was collected; and a controller that is specifically configured to: acquire update data to update the stored map data, the update of the stored map data changing the stored road characteristic information, the update data including update timestamp data for each link having changed road characteristic information as a result of the update, the update timestamp information indicating a time at which the road corresponding to the link having changed road characteristic information was changed; and process the stored evaluation information to eliminate evaluation information that is based on invalid evaluation parameters by: identifying which of the particular links having stored evaluation information have road characteristic information that has changed as a result of the updating of the stored map data; and for each of the particular links having stored evaluation information that have road characteristic information that has changed as a result of the updating of the stored map data: accessing the evaluation timestamp data for the particular link; accessing the update timestamp data for the particular link; and when the evaluation timestamp data indicates that the evaluation information was collected after the update timestamp data indicates the road corresponding to the particular link was changed, retroactively correcting the evaluation information for the particular link.