Effective assessment of AmI intervention in traffic through quantitative measures

Abstract

This chapter considers the challenge of quantifying the benefit of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) within a complex system, specifically a motorway traffic system. By nature, the deployment of AmI is distributed and inconsistent. Hence, an evaluation strategy must consider the individual to ensure desired or undesired effects are not hidden by only measuring at the whole-system level. For the evaluation we use quantitative measures for self-organizing properties of socio-technical systems. Although the measures are defined analytically for micro-level models, the systems are usually too complex to evaluate the measures analytically. Therefore we use approximation methods based on simulations: Time series received from simulations are used for the approximation of the measures for self-organizing properties. The results of the evaluation can be used for the analysis of the scenario, for the optimization of system parameters and for the assessment of AmI intervention in the system. For the considered devices, the main goal is the increase of safety in traffic by allowing system designers and infrastructure-operators to implement or dynamically choose the most appropriate device and parameters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.