Socially-Aware Transportation Systems

Abstract

The trustworthiness of information supplied to users of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) application is a crucial factor for the success of these applications, affecting these systems’ credibility and reliability. The criticality of information within ITS applications requires extra steps to make users trust these applications in a way that they will make ITS applications part of their daily use. In this work, a software system is proposed that takes advantage of an online social network as a source of trusted information between different users. This work exploits social relationships to infer trust values between users who are directly or indirectly connected to each other. We have derived trust propagation equations that infer trust based on the social distance between users, global reputation, and different groups of user categories. Trusted information is used in conjunction with transportation recommendations made by other users to help users decide whether or not to follow these suggestions. The proposed system achieves a merger between transportation information and online social network data in a way that enhances users’ experience of and trust in transportation information. Algorithms, architecture, and design were built for the proposed system, and a proof of concept for the system was implemented to show system behaviour. An evaluation of the system is made through simulations to show how such a system would behave and how performance would be affected by calculations of social trust between users. The main conclusion is that trust in ITS applications can be achieved through the calculation of propagated trust derived from online social networks.