Context-awareness and collaborative driving for intelligent vehicles and smart roads

We discuss the importance of context-awareness in driv-ing assistance systems (DAS). We motivate the advantages of incorporating the context in decision finding using sev-eral examples and show a hierarchical decomposition strat-egy for handling context information on a very general ba-sis. The utility of collaboration is pointed out by discussing various situations and applications where co-operation can significantly contribute to a reliable context-aware situation assessment and to reasonable decisions. Early indication of dangerous situations, higher comfort of driving and better support for inexperienced drivers or for driving in a less familiar environment are only some of many benefits that are expected to arise from co-operative driving assistance systems