Pervasive Adaptation in Car Crowds

Advances in the miniaturization and embedding of electronics for microcomputing, communication and sensor/actuator systems, have fertilized the pervasion of technology into literally everything. Pervasive computing technology is particularly flourishing in the automotive domain, exceling the “smart car”, embodying intelligent control mechanics, intelligent driver assistance, safety and comfort systems, navigation, tolling, fleet management and car-to-car interaction systems, as one of the outstanding success stories of pervasive computing. This paper raises the issue of the socio-technical phenomena emerging from the reciprocal interrelationship between drivers and smart cars, particularly in car crowds. A driver-vehicle co-model (DVC-model) is proposed, expressing the complex interactions between the human driver and the in-car and on-car technologies. Both explicit (steering, shifting, overtaking), as well as implicit (body posture, respiration) interactions are considered, and related to the drivers vital state (attentive, fatigue, distracted, aggressive). DVC-models are considered as building blocks in large scale simulation experiments, aiming to analyze and understand adaptation phenomena rooted in the feed-back loops among individual driver behavior and car crowds.