15. As You Like IT

A key issue towards SER and FRE is personalization, as explicitly advocated in Chap. 4. Within the concept of the IN-SAFETY project, two pilots have taken place, in Greece and Italy respectively, aiming to test a personalized system for in-vehicle transmission of traffic related information provided by Variable Message Signs (VMS). The design and development of the system tested in the Greek pilot is presented in the present chapter. To come up with the final system, four architectures were originally proposed; among these one (which was using Bluetooth technology) was finally abandoned for technical reasons and its presentation is outside the scopes of this chapter, whereas for the other three – finally selected – solutions (i.e. WLAN, GPS with GPRS) the theoretical and practical design are thoroughly described. Moreover, the issue of human–machine interface (HMI) is particularly looked into, with the target to provide the information to the drivers in a self-explaining and user-friendly manner, thus avoiding driver distraction and/or overload. After developing the system, technical verification tests have been performed on site to examine if the system is meeting the original expectations, as well as to identify shortcomings and ways to overcome them. The technical tests were followed by the full pilot tests, for assessing the proposed system with real drivers, whose results are presented here along with respective conclusions.