SocioTelematics: Harnessing social interaction-relationships in developing automotive applications

In a cooperative convoy, a vehicle interacts with other vehicles, service providers and infrastructure systems to make the travel safe and convenient. Through these interactions a vehicle can share its domain-specific information–acquired from service providers and infrastructure–with other vehicles in the convoy. Such interactions are subject to defined agreements and constraints between the entities (i.e., vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to service provider, and so on), which we refer as (social) interaction-relationships. Such relationships, however, may need to adapt with the changes of requirements. Also a driver may want to automate certain interactions to reduce distraction during driving. A cooperative convoy telematics system should support collaboration (i.e., allow drivers to share specific travel information) and coordination (i.e., allow drivers to automate interactions), and be able to adapt to cope with the changes of requirements.In this paper, we address these issues and demonstrate how our social interaction-relationships modelling technique can be exploited to develop a telematics system, called SocioTelematics, providing such functionalities. This system allows collaboration and coordination preferences explicitly specified and updated to cope with the changes. In particular, our service oriented implementation enhances adaptability of the system, making it easily deployable and changeable. We have implemented a prototype system based on a client–server architecture where the client application is developed for Android and the server is running on the Amazon cloud. The system’s performance and resource consumption were quantified using real life experiments that show the feasibility of our approach.