Assessing the Impact of In-Vehicle Traffic Management Information in the Demonstration Phase of COOPERS

COOPERS is a EU co-funded integrated project which tested and validated in vehicle traffic management information from a technical and drivers behaviour point of view on public motorways in 5 European Countries. The assessment of the impacts of Cooperative Systems depends on various variable factors which need to be taken into account: the number of risk prone situations in road traffic and their reduction due to dedicated advice to the driver, the mental workload for the driver in perceiving and interpreting the transmitted messages, the adaptation of the driver behaviour to the new systems. The selected approach includes technical validation of equipment, of communication media and of information services and combines this with user acceptance and human behaviour evaluations. This was achieved taking into account the following four areas in the analytical and practical work, the schema of measurement parameters, the testing procedure, the measurement methods and the analysis method. For the COOPERS system the user acceptance of the drivers is validated in the driving simulator and in the demonstration drives. The statistical values from the demonstration drives for user acceptance data show that the acceptance is significantly higher after testing the system and stress levels are reduced with the system on. Furthermore drivers do understand the messages transmitted into the vehicle and react positively, with a reduced driving speed ahead of the dangerous situation.