John A. Michon

Selected Writings 

Traffic and Safety

Among the many topics related to road-user behaviour that I have studied from the early 1960's onward, the role of human abilities and limitations have occupied an important place. Perceptual, operational and tactical skills, and the means of measuring them take centre stage in this selection of writings on traffic. Part of my concerns was the question how to describe these various aspects of the driving task in a coherent model. My work in this area culminated in the early 1990's in a large EU-sponsored project 'Generic Intelligent Driver Support' (better known by its acronym 'GIDS'), a theory-driven forerunner of many of the recent efforts at developing 'smart cars'.

• GIDS: Generic Intelligent Driver Support (1993) [PDF 715kB] 
  The area of road transport informatics (RTI) is rapidly evolving. This imparted, in the late 1980s, a sense of urgency to the question to what extent human operators will still be able to perform the task of driving a motor vehicle efficiently, reliably and safely under increasingly crowded and complex circumstances. The so-called GIDS project, as part of the EC-funded Dedicated Road Infrastructure for Vehicle Safety (DRIVE) Programme, aimed at determining the requirements and design standards for smart electronic co-driver systems. Such systems support human vehicle operators during task performance (i.e., driving) by providing them with information (road conditions, engine status), advice and warning and, under certain critical circumstances, interventions. The resulting book, of which the first chapter is repoduced here, has been called by prominent workers in this field the Old Testament of driver support and when the project was completed in 1992 the review committee had one important point of critique: it feared that the project overall was perhaps been ten years ahead of its time. Thatmeans that the reader should adopt a 2003 perspective when reading this chapter.
  
  
  
• Errors and driver support systems (1990) [PDF 245 kB] 
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• Explanatory pitfalls and rule-based driver models (1989) [PDF 1230kB]
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• A critical view of driver behavior models (1985) [PDF 240kB]
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• Dealing with danger (1979) [PDF 145kB]  
  Under the auspices of the Medical Research Committee of the European Commission, the Traffic Research Centre of the University of Groningen organized a round table on physiological and psychological factors under hazardous conditions with special reference to road traffic accidents (May 1978). This is the summary report of that important meeting, which focused on a theoretical framework that could serve as a practical context for empirical studies. It was originally published as Technical Report 79-01 of the Traffic Research Centre.