Enhancing User Acceptance of Traffic Services Using Imperfect Information

Due to the imperfection inherent in real world data, future traffic information services like navigation systems have to deal with missing, uncertain, vague and imprecise information. We argue that revealing the imperfection instead of cleaning data as in today’s services will result in higher user acceptance of a service. Such a service can give additional information on how good its returned data will match the real world situation and, therefore, users can better judge how to rank the proposition, e.g., which of the proposed route suggestions to follow. For implementing a service that handles imperfect data, such data has to be collected from the traffic system, stored in a suited database, processed by adapted algorithms and, finally, presented to service users in an appropriate manner.