European research on ISA : where are we now and what remains to be done?

Research on driver behaviour with ISA has been going on since 1982. Initially, the concentration was mainly on small field trials to study driver behaviour in a variety of equipped vehicles. This was soon followed with a number of studies of acceptance. With the growth of interest in ISA and the gathering pace of research on the system, there has been an increasing range of studies, looking at such issues as behavioural adaptation, response to different types of system, willingness to pay, modelling of network effects and prediction of safety benefits with large-scale use. The large scale trials in Sweden, carried out in 2000 and 2001, will provide vast quantities of data, including perhaps empirical information on network effects at high rates of system penetration. In part no doubt because of this extensive research and the clear case that has been made for the benefits of ISA, the ground has shifted. ISA implementation, which was originally perceived as a radical measure promoted by a fringe of safety researchers, is now considered virtually inevitable even by the car manufacturing industry. However, the research is by no means complete and there are a considerable number of important aspects and issues that remain unexplored. For example, there has been relatively little systematic real-world research exploring the impact of different levels of ISA intervention, ranging from advisory to non-overridable systems. There is little information to date on long-term behavioural adaptation to ISA and even less on long-term adaptation by non-ISA drivers to the presence of ISA vehicles. The implications of different HMIs such as the haptic throttle design used in Sweden and the "dead throttle" approach adopted in the Netherlands and the UK have not been explored. In terms of implementation strategies the full potential benefits of ISA have hardly been touched on: issues that remain to be explored include how best to implement dynamic ISA and what are the implications of the ability, offered by ISA, to provide traffic calming at very low cost. There are also major problems on the system architecture side, which will need to be solved if a pan-European capability is to be offered. And finally, and by no means least, the question of how ISA and non-ISA vehicles can operate side by side has not been addressed. For the covering abstract see ITRD E123876.