Nerius Tradisauskas

Pay as You Speed, ISA with incentives for not speeding: A case of test driver recruitment

The Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) project we describe in this article is based on Pay as You Drive principles. These principles assume that the ISA equipment informs a driver of the speed limit, warns the driver when speeding and calculates penalty points. Each penalty point entails the reduction of a 30% discount on the drivers car insurance premium, which therefore produced the name, Pay as You Speed. The ISA equipment consists of a GPS-based On Board Unit with a mobile phone connection to a web server. The project was planned for a three-year test period with 300 young car drivers, but it never succeeded in recruiting that number of drivers. After several design changes, the project eventually went forward with 153 test drivers of all ages. This number represents approximately one thousandth of all car owners in the proving ground of North Jutland in Denmark. Furthermore the project was terminated before its scheduled closing date. This article describes the project with an emphasis on recruitment efforts and the projects progress. We include a discussion of possible explanations for the failure to recruit volunteers for the project and reflect upon the general barriers to using ISA with ordinary drivers.

The COST benchmark—comparison and evaluation of spatio-temporal indexes

An infrastructure is emerging that enables the positioning of populations of on-line, mobile service users. In step with this, research in the management of moving objects has attracted substantial attention. In particular, quite a few proposals now exist for the indexing of moving objects, and more are underway. As a result, there is an increasing need for an independent benchmark for spatio-temporal indexes. This paper characterizes the spatio-temporal indexing problem and proposes a benchmark for the performance evaluation and comparison of spatio-temporal indexes. Notably, the benchmark takes into account that the available positions of the moving objects are inaccurate, an aspect largely ignored in previous indexing research. The concepts of data and query enlargement are introduced for addressing inaccuracy. As proof of concepts of the benchmark, the paper covers the application of the benchmark to three spatio-temporal indexes—the TPR-, TPR*-, and Bx-trees. Representative experimental results and consequent guidelines for the usage of these indexes are reported.

Intelligent speed adaptation in company vehicles

This paper describes an intelligent speed adaptation project for company vehicles. The intelligent speed adaptation function in the project is both information and incentive, which means that the intelligent speed adaptation equipment gives a warning as well as penalty points if the driver is speeding. Each month the driver with that monthpsilas fewest points wins an award. The paper presents results concerning speed attitude on the first three of a planned 12 months test period. In all 26 vehicles and 51 drivers from six companies participate in the project. The key result is that speeding is reduced from 18.7% to 7.4% on urban roads with a speed limit of 50 km/h while it is reduced from 18.9% to 4.7% on rural roads with a speed limit of 80 km/h.