Towards Context-Aware Vehicle Navigation in Urban Environments: Modeling Challenges

Currently, urban vehicle navigation is considered important because smoothness of traffic is needed for the sake of safety and cleanliness of air; in this regard, people essentially count on GPS navigation. Nevertheless, due to signal building shadows, GPS signal disturbances may occur in an urban environment; then alternative navigation options should be considered. It is therefore a matter of context-awareness to establish whether or not GPS navigation is available and adjust the delivered navigation services accordingly. In this paper we propose a top-down approach for modeling context-aware vehicle navigation systems; firstly, a high-level technology-independent conceptual model is derived (featuring context-awareness in general) and then this model is mapped towards corresponding lower-level technical solutions. Even though research materials, touching upon context-awareness or vehicle navigation, can be found in literature, we miss holistic approaches that align high-level (conceptual) goals with navigation-specific (technical) solutions; hence, our proposal is considered a step forward in this regard. We also propose an innovation concerning the technical aspects of navigation. Our proposed approach is partially validated by means of experiments.