Michèle Guilbot

Engineering, Human, and Legal Challenges of Navigation Systems for Personal Mobility

Walking is now promoted as an alternative transport mode to polluting cars and as a successful means to improve health and longevity. Intelligent transport systems navigation services are now directly targeting travelers due to smartphones and their embedded sensors. However, after a decade of research, no universal personal navigation system has been successfully introduced and adopted to improve personal mobility. An analysis of the underlying reasons is conducted, looking at the engineering, human, ethical, and legal challenges. First, contrary to adopting classical mechanization equations linked to solid state physics, location technologies must address complex personal dynamics using connected objects. Second, human factors are often not sufficiently considered while designing new technologies. The needs and abilities of travelers are not systematically addressed from a user-centered perspective. Finally, people want to benefit from location-based services without sharing personal location data to uncontrolled third bodies. Europe is a pioneer in the protection of individuals from personal identification through data processing since location data has been recognized as personal data, but the challenges to enforce the regulation are numerous. The recommendation of “privacy by design and default” is an interesting key to conceive the universal personal navigation solution. Alternative solutions are highlighted, but they definitively require a more interdisciplinary conception.

Acquisition and analysis of road incidents based on vehicle dynamics

Because motor vehicle crashes have decreased during the last decade in many countries in the world and are more diffuse, local authorities have difficulties to define road safety policies. An experiment with 51 cars of public fleets equipped with a specific Event Data Recorder was carried out in France during one year. The purposes of this research were to evaluate if incident data (critical driving situations) help to understand crashes, and to explore a new way for road infrastructure safety diagnosis. The analysis of 339 genuine incidents and 1237 simple events recorded illustrates the potentiality of such an experiment and provides: some insights about conditions in which incidents occur, a general overview of their distribution according to different road layouts, as well as information on the different levels of accelerations reached. It can be noticed that there is an overrepresentation of incidents in right curves compared to left curves. The simple events involving mostly the infrastructure could be used to detect road defects. Genuine incidents where the vehicle is subjected to important dynamic demands, related to potentially unsafe driving situations, can be used to improve knowledge of the motor vehicle crashes thanks to incident mechanisms analysis.