| Abstract: | Recent technological developments seem to pave the way to sophisticated electronic co-driver systems that may help automobile drivers to cope with an ever increasing information load, to avoid certain errors, and to recover from others. GIDS—which stands for Generic Intelligent Driver Support—is a research project (under the EEC DRIVE Programme) to study the feasibility of an adaptive co-driver system. The conceptualization of a GIDS system requires close attention to performance errors as they may occur in certain subtasks of the driving task. One important issue that should be considered in some detail is that GIDS may eliminate errors as well as introduce them. Should various types of errors be represented formally and, if so, how they should be represented in order that GIDS can detect and cope with behavioural errors that drivers are likely to make under certain conditions? The requirements imposed by the project's goal to actually implement various driver support functions into a GIDS system is imposing tight constraints on error definition and identification. Some of the requirements will be discussed in terms of Soar. Soar is an intelligent computer architecture which is the embodiment of the theory of human problem solving formulated by Newell and Simon (1972). To the extent that the driving task is representable in Soar, the error theory that is required for any type of GIDS system to function must also be representable in Soar. |
