by Jaroslav Machan and Christian Laugier

Socio-economic context
The recent global economic growth and the related overall increase in volumes of transportation, along with stronger public demand for mobility, are leading causes of road infrastructure congestion and of a large number of accidents and deaths (about one fatality per every 100 million km of driving and a social cost in France of 23 billion Euros in 2011). These factors have lead to a heavy rise in both energy consumption and also environmental and social problems.

by Evangeline Pollard, Fawzi Nashashibi and Paulo Resende

The purpose of the ABV project was to demonstrate the technical feasibility of fully automated driving at speeds below 50 km/h in urban and suburban areas with adequate infrastructure quality (no intersections, known road geometry and lane markings available). Researchers of Inria were in charge of the automation of an electrified Citröen C1 Ev’ie.

by Zdeněk Lokaj, Tomas Zelinka and Miroslav Šrotýř

Cooperative systems are playing an increasingly important role in the automotive industry, particularly in relation to improvement of safety. Telecommunication solutions are crucial in cooperative systems, owing to the need to deliver data to appropriate places at appropriate times. This paper describes state-of-the-art of cooperative systems and describes one real application which is under development.

by Xihui Chen, Carlo Harpes, Gabriele Lenzini, Sjouke Mauw and Jun Pang

The growing popularity of location-based services such as GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) navigation requires confidence in the reliability of the calculated locations. The exploration of a user’s location also gives rise to severe privacy concerns. Within an ESA (European Space Agency) funded project, we have developed a service that not only verifies the correctness of users’ locations but also enables users to control the accuracy of their revealed locations.

by Avenir Kobetski and Jakob Axelsson

What will cars talk about when they start communicating with each other? Volvo and SICS Swedish ICT have launched a collaborative project to open the computer systems of cars for the market of apps.

by Raffaele Bruno, Andrea Passarella, Leandro D’Orazio and Filippo Visintainer

Map-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is one of the key applications for future “Intelligent Car” environments. Unfortunately, network capacity limitations may hinder their efficiency and large-scale adoption. The FP7 MOTO project investigates offloading on vehicle to vehicle (V2V) opportunistic networks as a suitable way to overcome such limitations, thus enabling ADAS and other data-hungry future vehicular applications.

by Josef Jiru

Of the 2.36 million traffic accidents recorded in Germany in 2011, traffic congestion and tailgating caused the most injuries. Because they are usually positioned at one to two kilometer intervals, conventional traffic control systems do not adequately warn drivers of sudden danger situations. When positioned between the systems, drivers must rely solely on their own perception of the situation. To address this issue, Fraunhofer ESK is working with Ruetz Technologies and TRANSVER to develop an autonomous traffic warning and information platform that can more quickly detect critical situations and provide precise local warnings through finer granularity.

by Nicholas Loulloudes, George Pallis and Marios D. Dikaiakos

With the proliferation of wireless hardware that supports communication standards designed exclusively for the vehicular environment (IEEE 802.11p / WAVE), the wide deployment of Vehicular Networks (VANETs) is one step closer to realization. However, due to the inherent dynamics of mobility, the spatio-temporal topological features of such networks remain largely unknown, thereby putting at stake the quality of service provided by those intelligent applications for which VANETs were envisioned. The study of V2X communication dynamics from the aspect of Complex Network science can provide crucial insights to these features.

by Thierry Delot and Sergio Ilarri

The importance of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is expected to increase significantly in the next few years: According to a recent survey by ABI Research, about 62% of new vehicles will be equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications by 2027. This opens up a wide range of opportunities to develop different types of services for drivers, related to safety, entertainment, and information. For example, vehicles can communicate with to others information about events such as accidents, traffic jams, emergency vehicles requiring right of way, the availability of parking spaces, etc.

by Javier Ibanez-Guzman and Christian Laugier

Motor vehicles are becoming complex-networked mobile computers. Modern vehicles include numerous networked microprocessor-based Electronic Control Units (ECUs) ensuring multiple vehicle functionalities that include safety critical functions. As a comparison, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and on board support systems. By 2009, it was estimated that a luxury vehicle should run on close to 100 million lines of software code on 70 to 100 networked ECUs [1]. Currently, the rapid introduction of sensor-based driving assistance systems, digital maps for navigation plus vehicle connectivity means a rapid increase in the use of software for safety related functions leading to platforms under full computer control and hence autonomous driving [2].

by Yanja Dajsuren, Mark G.J. van den Brand and Alexander Serebrenik

A design language and tool like MATLAB/Simulink is used for the graphical modelling and simulation of automotive control software. As the functionality based on electronics and software systems increases in motor vehicles, it is becoming increasingly important for system/software architects and control engineers in the automotive industry to ensure the quality of the highly complex MATLAB/Simulink control software. For automotive software, modularity is recognized as being a crucial quality attribute; therefore at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands we have been carrying out industrial case studies on defining and validating the modularity of Simulink models.

by Dmitry Rozhdestvenskiy and Petr Bouchner

We address the problem of the introduction of car sharing systems for electric vehicles within big cities through simulation of such systems. Simulation is an important step in the early stages of the development of new technologies. In contrast to standard simulation techniques, this project deals with simulation through introduction of a virtual online system and building up a model of real consumers’ behaviour based on their opinions from “pseudo real” experience.

by Frank Verberne, Jaap Ham and Cees Midden

In the future, cars will be better at driving themselves than humans are. These cars will be useless, however, if humans do not trust them. Researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, are studying how to increase trust in automation technology in cars. In a human-technology interaction, we investigate whether technology can use similar trust enhancing mechanisms to those used by humans to build trust in each other, such as emphasizing similarity. Will technology that thinks, acts, and looks similar to its user will be trusted more than its non-similar version?

by Rob van der Mei, Maaike Bots and Frank Ottenhof

The use of in-car technology and real-time traffic information has been growing spectacularly over the past few years, and this growth is not likely to come to an end in the near future. However, despite their enormous benefits for our modern society, today’s navigation systems take into account important safety and environmental aspects to a limited extent at best. Moreover, the enormous diversity of the traffic-management applications and in-car systems available today often leads to contradictory routing advices and in many cases even to network instability. This raises the need for proper coordination between in-car navigation systems and traffic-control centres. CWI is developing data fusion models to estimate highway traffic. In the future these can be used as input for traffic forecasts.