Designing Future Advisory Traffic Information Systems - A Step towards Cross-Regional Adaptive Design for Improving Driving Safety and Comfort

Licentiatavhandling, 2015

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving capabilities have become increasingly widespread, and implementations already exist in cars today. Given these dramatic technological changes, human-machine interaction design is facing new challenges. One of the major challenges is the communication with the driver, as there is often a disparity between how the system behaves and the driver’s expectations. Another difficulty is that drivers may over-rely on the automation systems, and this reduces situation awareness, which in turn creates problems in reclaiming control when necessary. Furthermore, ADAS developments are traditionally based on drivers’ requirements from mature markets, such as Europe, the US and Japan. But how would ADAS perform in China, where there is dense and mixed traffic? The aim of this thesis is to gain better insights into cross-regional adaptive design on advisory traffic information systems. The purpose of advisory systems is to provide foresight traffic information to support the driver’s situation awareness. To fulfill the aim, the studies have departed from a user-centered design approach in order to understand what drivers really want. In addition, different traffic scenarios were integrated into the design procedure to identify the contextual design constraints. Two design requirements studies and two driving simulator studies have been carried out with both Swedish and Chinese drivers. The information requirement studies in this thesis showed that the similarities between Swedish and Chinese participants are greater than the differences. For example, they have similar design preferences and information requirements when interacting with a single road user. However, interesting differences were found when multiple road users were involved in the situation, e.g., when entering ramps, cutting in or changing lanes. The driving performance results indicated that advisory traffic information systems assisted Swedish and Chinese participants in different ways due to the different regional driving strategies and habits. Moreover, acceptance results also emphasized that an interface design entirely carried out in one region will likely result in lower user acceptance in another region. To conclude, cross-regional adaptive designs should focus on specific situations where the regional difference occurs, making it a feasible approach to a successful global design.