Driver-vehicle confluence or how to control your car in future?

Human-computer confluence (HCC) aims at investigating how the emerging symbiotic relation between humans and computing devices can enable new forms of sensing, perception, interaction, and comprehension. Latest advancements in information and communication technology have been the key enabler that this vision actually became reality. The concept of driver-vehicle confluence is understood as a specific instantiation of HCC, and its main objective is to understand the symbiosis between drivers, cars, and the infrastructure within an arbitrarily large region of interest. This covers not only information sharing within a collective of cars, for example about an oil spill on the road -- more important is to reason about driver states, learn about social connections and emotional influences, and forecast driver action or vehicle movement. All these can be achieved by modeling driver behavior, studying distributed negotiation processes, performing driving studies and simulations, and relating the results back to observations made in reality.

In this visionary paper we identify some of the most crucial problems and present some possible solutions to establish driver-vehicle confluence in the automotive domain. By introducing this concept we are dealing with complex traffic situations, many distributed vehicles (i. e., driver-car pairs) that can act in orchestration, or drivers represented as emoting individuals. The success of any objective to achieve is mainly determined by wide user acceptance. For this reason, advantages and positive effects should superficially be generated for the individual driver. Some examples are reduced traveling time, lower fuel consumption/CO₂ emission, or a more relaxed style of driving (improved driving experience and pleasure). Due to the close coupling and interconnectedness of involved entities, effects on the local level would directly induce changes such as increased road safety, traffic flow optimization or enhanced economy of driving, also on the global scale. Two concrete scenarios are outlined in the back of this paper to accentuate the potential and beneficial effects the application of driver-vehicle confluence might have on future traffic.