10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17254
The paper focuses on technology designers’ representations and discourses about advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS). This issue has been empirically explored by means of seven in-depth interviews with academic experts in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Two main areas are investigated: 1) the meaning of advanced driver assistance and 2) the failures in intelligent driving and the consequent need to cope with them. The overall aim is to identify dominant views about the instances of “failing” and the possibilities for control, which are inscribed in the design processes of ADAS. One of the main findings concerns the designers’ emphasis on the continuous supervising, correction, and enhancement of human functioning as the core of driver assistance. According to this view, human senses, reactions and interactivity with technology turn into subjects of continuous supervision, prevention, correction, improvement and restriction – a sort of “real-time human maintenance and repair”.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17254
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Oana Stefana Mitrea
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
automobilities
Instances of Failures, Maintenance, and Repair in Smart Driving
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
6
Essays
2016-01-29
2023-06-17
2016-01-29
2023-08-03
61-80
TS
Oana Stefana Mitrea
2015
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17254
61
Alpen-Adria Universität, Klagenfurt
2038-3460
2
automobilities
en
80
Instances of Failures, Maintenance, and Repair in Smart Driving
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17254/16118
6
                                                                                 Essay
                                                                                        61




Instances of Failures, Maintenance, and
Repair in Smart Driving
Oana Stefana Mitrea
Alpen-Adria Universität, Klagenfurt
	
  
       Abstract: The paper focuses on technology designers’ representations and
       discourses about advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS). This issue
       has been empirically explored by means of seven in-depth interviews with
       academic experts in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Two main
       areas are investigated: 1) the meaning of advanced driver assistance and 2)
       the failures in intelligent driving and the consequent need to cope with
       them. The overall aim is to identify dominant views about the instances of
       “failing” and the possibilities for control, which are inscribed in the design
       processes of ADAS. One of the main findings concerns the designers’
       emphasis on the continuous supervising, correction, and enhancement of
       human functioning as the core of driver assistance. According to this view,
       human senses, reactions and interactivity with technology turn into subjects
       of continuous supervision, prevention, correction, improvement and
       restriction – a sort of “real-time human maintenance and repair”.

       Keywords: intelligent technology; advanced driver assistance; driver
       monitoring; human-machine co-agency; automobilities.

       Corresponding author: Alpen-Adria Universität, Institute for Smart
       System Technologies, Lakeside Park B04, 9020 Klagenfurt – Email:
       oana.mitrea@aau.at.



1. Introduction

    The usual perspective about maintenance and repair of conventional
technology (i.e. which does not carry the labels “smart”, “advanced”, or
“intelligent”) is that humans in various roles are the only ones able to
check its functionality, to observe and fix eventual failures. The internal
elements, motions and operations in such technical systems are easily vis-
ible and the relationship cause–effect for faults and failures is quite clear.
Therefore, conventional technology can be easily dismantled into com-
prehensible pieces, which can be re-assembled for new purposes. In this
view the malfunctioning of various infrastructures contains the germ of

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
6 (2) pp. 61-80 - ISSN 2038-3460
	
  
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62                                                             Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

innovation in its core (Graham and Thrift 2007; Jackson 2014). The ne-
cessity to fit the technological systems “to the sticky realities” (Jackson
2014, 227) of the real-world driving, living, working, communicating, etc.
should in principle encourage the involved actors (users, technology de-
signers) to improvise and come with sometimes unconventional, but reali-
ty-friendly solutions.
     However, in “advanced technologies” such as ITS (intelligent trans-
portation systems) the humans confront with a much higher complexity, a
hidden autonomous activity, and a high interactivity of technology
(Rammert and Schulz-Schaeffer 2002). In-and-out sensors embedded in
vehicles and road infrastructures perceive changes in the environment.
Data from various sources are then processed and turned into integrated
information, which is further provided to human users through user in-
terfaces. Advanced technologies operate in “intelligent spaces” that are
“environments that continuously monitor what’s happening in them,
communicate with their inhabitants and neighbourhoods, make related
decisions, and act on these decisions” (Wang et al. 2006, 68-69). Such sys-
tems pretend to be active to the extent that they even seize their own re-
pair and maintenance in a process of “self-healing” (Graham and Thrift
2007). The self-supervision of functionality, automatic fault detec-
tion/diagnosis, and self-repair are currently established abilities of ad-
vanced technologies. The current paper proposes a perspective on
“maintenance in repair” according to which technology designers of ad-
vanced driver assistance systems increasingly see humans as possible sub-
jects of failures and breakdowns. In this vision drivers should be con-
stantly supervised and restored to functionality if they become fatigued,
stressed, distracted or show signs of health deterioration. This perspective
is explored by means of interviews with experts working in the field of In-
telligent Transportation Systems and completed by a brief review of the
technological state-of-the-art.
     The present article is structured in five parts. The first part is dedicat-
ed to the introductory analysis of the current perspectives on mainte-
nance and repair. This is followed by the presentation of designers’
scripts on ADAS and further developments such as vehicle automation,
based on the study of the field literature. The paper continues with the
description of the methodology of the qualitative study and the presenta-
tion of results. The last part is dedicated to the discussion of the empirical
findings and the directions for future research.


2. Perspectives on Maintenance and Repair in Hybrid
Systems

   Despite the fact that maintenance and repair are considered central is-
sues for the understanding of modern societies, they have been so far in-
Mitrea                                                                                                                                                                                                                             63
sufficiently studied and understood (Graham and Thrift 2007). Neverthe-
less, their importance comes clearly to light when their disruptive effects
manifest in economy and society. Let’s only mention the impact of cell
phone disconnection on healthcare and health (Gonzales et al. 2014), the
nightmare of electricity and IT systems blackouts, or the failing of traffic
signalization in a big city. As Graham und Thrift (2007) emphasize:
“Things only come into visible focus as things when they become inoper-
able- they break and stutter and they then become the object of attention.
Such disconnection produces learning, adaption and improvisation”
(Graham and Thrift 2007, 5).
    The social sciences literature comes with various perspectives about
the concepts of maintenance and repair. For Graham and Thrift (2007)
the importance of maintenance and repair is justified by some particulari-
ties of material things such as: intrinsic power (things are “transductions
with many conditions of possibility and their own form of intentionali-
ty”), pluriculturality, increase in number and complexity (fact that re-
quires even more maintenance and repair), the difficulty to define the
border of “things” (they could represent more than supposed). It is also
emphasized that: “Breakdowns come to have an essential quality to them,
since they may well affect large numbers of people simultaneously” (Gra-
ham and Thrift 2007). Ureta follows Foucault in defining repair as: “a
particular form of power that, first, recognizes a certain normal state to
which the failing system should evolve and, second, develops different
strategies to reach it, usually involving the deployment of particular disci-
plinary devices. The ultimate aim of such practices is usually not only the
improvement of the system but centrally the maintenance of a certain
kind of power” (Ureta 2014, 368). The Human and Computer Interaction
branch sees repairs as: “acts of sustaining, managing, and repurposing to
cope with attrition and regressive change”, advocating for its high im-
portance in design of ICTs (Rosner et al. 2013).
    The research on maintenance and repair has focused, amongst others,
on the unification of the social and material in urban cities as social sys-
tems for maintenance and repair (Graham and Thrift 2007; Hall and
Smith 2015), the “remediation work” in the travel sector as response to
terrorist attacks (Ball et al. 2014), the repair of failing large sociotechnical
systems (Ureta 2014), the vulnerability of systems enacted in repair and
maintenance practices as a dimension of material ordering processes and
care for things (Denis and Pontille 2015), the improvisation and creativity
resulting from the possibility to dissemble technology, attending of con-
sumer objects within the home (Gregson et al. 2009)1.
    In the “tightly drawn” infrastructural networks (Graham and Thrift,
2007) of the present, the distinction between things and human actions is
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
                     1
      For a review of studies on repair and maintenance from the perspective of
Human computer Interaction (HCI) in connection with a CHI workshop on this
topic see Rosner et al. (2013).
64                                                           Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

blurred and hybrid constructs emerge. The driver-car represents such an
assembled social being that depicts the properties of both sides (Dant
2004; Urry 2006). As of lately, intelligent transportation systems (ITS)
have grown into a spinal socio-technical cord of human-machine activities
integrating movement, communication, and information into a complex
structure. More than being a good illustration for actor-network theory
(Graham and Thrift 2007), the mix of bodies and machines in the current
advanced technological systems puts new challenges to the study of
maintenance and repair.
    One of the most important challenges regards the blurring of agency
fields of humans and technologies. Pervasive technologies are in general
subject of confusing accountability of agency: “in many instances we are
unable (from an outside point of view) to distinguish human action from
non-human action, because the system’s behavior is almost identical”
(Weyer 2005, 10). If we take the example of modern aviation, both hu-
man and non-human elements could be involved in failures and system
breakdowns to various degrees, as well as in the activities of maintenance
and repair. The causes of aviation accidents combine “pitfalls of automa-
tion, organizational failure, insufficient training of humans, as well as di-
vergent safety cultures and unresolvable conflict” (Weyer 2006). It is ex-
tremely difficult to determine a “decisive” contribution of one or other of
these causes to accidents, because the responsibilities and actions of tech-
nology and humans are widely distributed (Weyer 2006a). In this distrib-
utive constellation, one core responsibility of the advanced technology (in
ADAS, cockpit automation, Smart Homes, etc.) is to achieve the control
of the environment also through the intensive supervision of technologi-
cal and human functionality. In the context of generalized monitoring the
supervised humans may be prevented from acting strategically and from
learning from past failures because: “they try to avoid situations in which
the individual can fail (and learn) – by presenting or rather constructing a
"perfect" world, that shows up according to the system's rules, the user
does neither know nor understand.”(Weyer 2005, 7). The logic of intelli-
gent systems is the “preventive avoidance of learning (by doing or by ex-
perience)” (id.).
    Against this background, failures and repair in hybrid systems in
which artificial agents and humans interact and act together (Weyer
2006b) represent complex topics that need to be addressed more in detail
by the research dedicated on maintenance and repair. There is still need
for research about the contexts and possibilities and failing in such systems,
the accountability for this (who/what acts, who/what is responsible for the
consequences of maintenance and repair), and the solving possibilities.
Mitrea                                                                    65
3. Technological Scripts of Driver Assistance: from
Advanced Driver Assistance to Driverless Cars

The current assistance in ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems)
ranges from information providing (navigation systems, Traffic Master
and RDS-TMC receivers), feed-back with the intention of reducing driv-
ers errors and traffic violations (longitudinal collision warning systems,
lane departure warning systems and lane-change assistant systems) to in-
tervention in vehicle control without completely supplanting the driver
such as intelligent speed adaptation, Adaptive Cruise control, Stop and
Go (Carsten and Nilsson 2001).
    The strongest motivation for the development of solutions for driver
assistance is the enhancement of traffic safety. Traffic safety research has
generally established that static characteristics such as age, gender, cogni-
tive and motoric internal characteristics, level of experience, influence the
way in which drivers behave on the road (Evans 2004; Shinar 2007).
Some categories seem to carry the “unsafety” germ in their core, such as:
“the adolescent driver” (Glendon 2011), “old drivers” (Schultheis and
Manning 2011), males, among them particularly the “the sensation-
seeking” ones (Rosenbloom and Wolf 2002). The youngest drivers seem
to manifest a tendency for risk taking and immediate rewards, have a ra-
ther irrational, disorganized thought pattern and manifest a delayed pro-
cessing of critical information about generically dangerous situations
(Glendon 2011).
    The focus of traffic safety research has been placed also on the nega-
tive effects of dynamic states such as inattentiveness and sleepi-
ness/drowsiness (Evans 2004). In the last times there have been growing
efforts to detect such dynamic drivers’ states, which resulted in various
driver monitoring systems to monitor sleepiness, drowsiness, distraction,
or inattentiveness on the road (Wang et al. 2007; Rogado et al. 2009; Park
et al. 2011; Regan and Hallett 2011). Volvo has developed a fatigue moni-
toring system based on a sensor anchored in the instrument panel that
registers the direction in which the driver looks, how far his eyes are open
and how he or she holds her head. If fatigue signs are detected, the car
increases the distance to the car ahead as a precautionary measure and
warns the driver. Such system should also be able to warn drivers before
nodding off. Technical solutions are developed according to “scripts” de-
scribed by Akrich (1992) as: “the end-product of the designers’ hypothe-
ses and visions about the entities that make up the world into which the
object is inserted” (Akrich 1992, 207-208). As the literature on advanced
driving assistance systems and particularly monitoring systems shows, the
dominant representations of technology developers about driving are
populated by dangers that can be intelligently detected and prevented
through the in-advance recognition of some “bad or dangerous” charac-
teristics of the involved elements.
66                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

    This smart recognition should enable the warning of drivers (and thus
the correction of their behavior). Technology should even take over the
control when humans are not able to control the vehicle anymore. In the
last time, in parallel to the efforts for a better understanding of the driv-
ers’ behaviours, there are significant efforts to further decrease the arbi-
trariness of human actions by means of autonomous driving. The vision
of driverless cars has been lately enthusiastically adopted by the many en-
gineers working in the ITS field, as the recent ITS IEEE conferences tes-
tify. A true “revolution” in vehicle automation is expected, made possible
by the low-cost sophisticated sensors (Denaro, 2013). Ideally, the auton-
omous driving should bring liberation from the strains of driving, a better
employment of humans’ mobility time, and a higher in-car comfort. The
concrete realization of this vision has technical, as well as human and so-
cial requirements and paths of action. From the technical point of view
the road towards the establishment of automated driving systems is
marked by implementations such as: automatic gears and power steering,
servo systems open windows, roof lights, sensor-based monitoring system
that adjusts the heat inside and responds to the outside environments by
switching wipers and lights on and off, anti-lock brakes and devices that
control suspension and over-steering. (Laurier and Dant 2011).
    Recently DIBOX implements the vision of smart cars communicating
with drivers and answering to questions such as: Have I lock up the car?
Should I refuel the car today? How much time do I spend in the car?
How I have driven in the last time? Other developments are Adaptive
Cruise Control (ACC) and platooning (cars driving automatically a row
with short spacings between them). Also the field of Cooperative Traffic
Systems features pilot projects with corresponding policy recommenda-
tions. In the project Drive Me2 (2014-2017) self-driving cars will ride on
about 50 km of selected roads in and around Gothenburg. This will be
made possible by the cooperative traffic technology that enables the in-
teraction between vehicles and street infrastructure. The control of the
road and traffic is combined with that of the driver. The official homep-
age of the project highlights some individual benefits for drivers that
should derive from the mix of autonomous and active driving:

                     Autonomous driving will fundamentally change the way we look at driving
                     cars, as you can plan your drive with a mix of autonomous and active driv-
                     ing. This makes the journey more time-efficient. You can safely interact via
                     phone or tablets or simply choose to relax. The self-driving technology
                     used in the pilot allows you to hand over the driving to the car when the

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
                     2
     The pilot project will be conducted von Volvo Car Group in cooperation
with the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport
Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park, and
the city of Gothenburg: www.multivu.com/mnr/64153-volvo-self-driving-cars-
unique-swedish-project (last access: 28/10/2015).
Mitrea                                                                    67
    circumstances are appropriate comments. (Håkan Samuelsson, CEO of
    Volvo)

    The google car project has recently (2014) allowed reporters from
Spiegel to act as test passengers through the dense traffic in Silicon Val-
ley. Their most striking feeling was that the driverless car had not be-
haved in the fluent traffic differently from other cars: “The car accelerates
and brakes smoothly, changes lines as it should, stops at zebra crossings
for pedestrians, avoids cyclists, and follows a modified traffic routing at a
construction site” (Schulz 2014). The autonomous driving mainly chal-
lenges the possibilities for human agency and the perspective of driving as
an activity accomplished with others (Laurier and Dant 2011, 228).
Technology designers expect that the task of driving disappears, as cars
turn into uncoupled small train carriages – a new hybrid form of car-train
assemblage (Laurier and Dant, 2011). As Thrift emphasizes: “what is
thought to be a mature technology is currently changing and transmitting
into quite different by an oblique route” (Thrift, 2004, 48). Autonomous
technology should in principle make the traffic more predictable and
faultless, as “driverless cars will follow the rules, abide by speed limits,
and stop at stop signs without growing bored, tired or resistant of doing
so”(Laurier and Dant 2011, 239). However, perverse effects concerning
the objective of the reduction of congestion may appear, since the attrac-
tiveness of driverless cars will bring more vehicles on the road (ivi). The
variety of emotionally charged actions in which drivers and passengers are
currently involved while inhabiting the car: story-telling, learning, plan-
ning, complaints, mundane economica (Laurier and Dant 2011, 229)
might be reduced through automation. Distraction and fatigue as im-
portant sources of road accidents should be eliminated. Vehicle automa-
tion could lead to less social interaction between humans and more con-
centration on “insular activities such as reading or working on comput-
er”(Laurier and Dant, 2011, 237), relaxation and entertainment. Howev-
er, for the present moment, the ITS community emphasize that “autono-
mous driving” or “automated vehicles” should not be made equal to
“driverless” since drivers should remain an important part of the system.
As the own observation of conference presentations and informal discus-
sions at the IEEE ICTS2013 has confirmed, the designers’ community be-
lieves that drivers should not be alienated from driving and be relieved
from the responsibility for the driving process. The future inhabitants of
automatic cars should retain the responsibility for the consequences of
driving (for regulatory reasons, industry interests). A new dilemma occurs
for this transition phase: how reach and maintain both driver inclusion
and exclusion in driving a semi-autonomous car? It can be observed that
the visions of the community of technology designers about how to assist
humans in their mobility are not without tensions and contradictions. The
inclusion and exclusion of humans from driving activities has to be some-
times implemented in the same wave of technology development, as the
68                                                           Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

future development of driver awareness solutions in semi-automated cars
will show. In this vision, the role of drivers will be rather that of “watch-
ing absents”, who are allowed to work, read, play and sleep, while also
keeping their eyes on the machine controls and the road. The monitored
humans will still have to monitor the technology.


4. The Empirical Study

4.1. Methodology

    Adopting a phenomenological approach based on qualitative meth-
ods, the main objectives of the research in the current paper are to ana-
lyze how designers’ scripts about advanced driver assistance relate to the
topic of failures, maintenance and repair in intelligent driving. The work-
ing hypothesis of the empirical study is that technology designers regard
failures and breakdowns in traffic as mainly deriving from human behav-
iour. They are open therefore to a necessary monitoring of human drivers
that is necessary to make up a world of “safe and pleasant mobility”.
    Seven interviews were conducted in 2014 with academic researchers
working in the field of ITS research and development in Austria, region
of Carinthia. Their main area of expertise is advanced driver assistance
systems, road traffic signals, and driver and driving monitoring. All inter-
viewed persons were males, aged from 25 to 46 years. Their experience in
the field ranges from 2-3 years to more than 20 years (2 persons). In spite
of the recognized importance of gender issue for the analysis of technolo-
gy scripts (Oudshoorn et al. 2004), due to local circumstances it was not
possible to include female experts in the study. The results have to be
therefore interpreted in terms of technological scripts of male designers
about driver assistance. The interview partners were approached face-to-
face and informed that the study aimed at exploring their attitudes about
the new developments in the field of intelligent vehicles, driver assistance
and vehicle automation.
    An interview guideline has been developed on the basis of the opera-
tionalization of the concepts. The perspective on the assistance of drivers
adopted in the study relies on the combination of three dimensions: sup-
port of safety (either by actively supporting the driving task, or passively
supporting the car itself), information (traffic or situational information,
such as navigation and traffic information receivers), and support of en-
tertainment and car environment (video, music and multimedia, light and
temperature). Failures and breakdowns have been explored in these are-
as, with a particular focus on the safety dimension. During the question-
ing of the meanings of driver assistance no definition of concepts or di-
mensions has been previously given to the interview partners. The objec-
tive was to obtain spontaneous wordings, representations, and examples.
Mitrea                                                                             69
Although the interview participants were encouraged to freely follow
spontaneous ideas as they had appeared, special attention was paid to the
following topics:

         ⎯ General cognitions and attitudes about ITS and ADAS;
         ⎯ The role and intervention powers of humans/technology in intelligent
                driving;
         ⎯ The meaning of driver assistance with examples;
         ⎯ Types of failures in the ADAS supported driving. Coping with failure
                and breakdowns;
         ⎯ Attitudes towards driving automation.

    The interviews were audio-recorded. The length of expert interviews
was between 45 minutes and 1 ½ hours. Five interviews were conducted
in English and two in German (translated afterwards by the interviewer).


4.2. Results

4.2.1. Background             Representations        of    Advanced        Driver
Assistance

    The experts’ representations about driver assistance technologies pro-
vide the interpretation background for the section dedicated to the fail-
ures of human and technological elements and the coping with this. The
main goal of the analysis has been to establish how advanced technologies
are supposed to support humans by means of semi-autonomous actions
and human-machine communication, particularly in the case of incongru-
ence between driving goals and actual behaviour, at the strategic, tactic
and operational levels.
    The meaning of driver assistance enjoying highest consensus among
technology developers is synthesized by the expert 7 as: “the support of
human perception; reasoning, and action (support to drive)”. Related to
perception, expert 7 stresses the importance of issues such as the range of
perception and its reliability. Sensors can represent here a key problem,
because they can break down, or have a low reliability. The resulting per-
ception can be not good enough or fail in particular conditions such as
rain, night vision or fog. Driver assistance is understood also as a neces-
sary extension of drivers’ powers and senses, not only in what concerns
the provision of night vision or dead angle visualization but also related to
their fluent integration in the traffic flow:

    for example the system can warn you that if you still drive that speed you
    will reach red light and you slow down a little bit you will be green and so
    on…so it can make the traffic flow to make it more fluent. (Expert 3)
70                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

    A good perception provides the basis for the best reasoning about
what to do in a given driving situation. The particular emphasis in the
support of human reasoning lies on the transforming of real-time driving
data into information useful for drivers. As Expert 6 maintained, “driver
assistance is about providing information in correct time to help the user
make the right ‘correct’ decision”. Last but not the least, it is expected
that the assistive technology improves the adequacy of human actions to
the challenges of the driving context and also enhances the rapidity of
manoeuvres. This is because human reactions are slow compared to au-
tomated actions. In addition, if the driver is tired his/her attention de-
creases and wrong manoeuvres are performed and good manoeuvres may
be disregarded.
    During the interviewing process I have become aware of a strong ap-
prehension of the experts about humans as dangers in traffic. As sponta-
neously emphasized by expert 7, the current state-of-the-art cars are very
reliable and predictable. On the contrary 90% of the problems in traffic
appear due to the human component, therefore the necessity to monitor
what happens to the human driver over short periods of driving. Expert 2
generally agrees with the necessity of “automating” human processes and
minimizing human errors:

     I believe that wherever people work, there are dangers and problems. I be-
     lieve that the traffic and the technology has become so complex, so many
     areas are loaded with dangers and problems that such risks and potential
     dangers are getting bigger. The traffic volume is generally growing. If one
     thinks at the air traffic, the volume of air traffic continues to grow, more
     and more machines start and land, the processes become more complex,
     ...increasingly more technology is needed to automate the human factor.
     (Expert 2)

     This belief is also shared by Expert 1:

     I believe that currently humans represent for me the most serious danger
     area, for they are the ones who more or less cause accidents. Here could
     technology a bit intervene, to minimize or eliminate this cause...Fully elim-
     inate is not possible, I believe that no one gives up the 100% control. Not
     even myself I want this... (Expert 1)

    The reserve of this particular expert about the reduction of all human
errors by technology represents an interesting illustration of how engi-
neers often feel when working in human-centred technology projects.
One the one side, there is a high enthusiasm about the technical possibili-
ties opened in intelligent transportation systems, which is often reinforced
by successful development and testing of prototypes and encouraging
theoretical results. The reverse of the coin is a growing awareness about
difficulty of understanding and grasping the full complexity of human
behaviour in system modelling. Some experts manifest an open scepticism
Mitrea                                                                                71
about the possibility to understand and control human drivers:

    The human being is the most intelligent system to perform in real-time,
    and in an intelligent way while machines follow a program and are usually
    not pro-active” and “Humans are chaotic systems with a great degree of
    unpredictability”. (Expert 4)

    The same expert states that human beings are endowed with the flexi-
bility to create new rules and to react to new, previously unknown condi-
tions. On the contrary intelligent systems are programmed to react to a
variety of situations imagined by the human being, while not being able to
create and invent new rules.
    An additional challenge for the design of intelligent systems assisting
humans is represented by the high complexity and non-linearity of both
human and technical systems. If these two complexities are brought to-
gether in a socio-technical system such as the modern traffic, the predict-
ability of system’s behaviour is strongly challenged. As expert 3 empha-
sizes:

    If you look at the traffic modelling or traffic controlling, you see that they
    are complex systems, random and non-linear. The main cause of this non-
    linearity is driver behaviour. Traffic rules set frames to drivers, they should
    behave as such to respect the rules and move between limits of what the
    traffic should be. Rules are related to some risk in speed, lane change, but
    there are other behaviours that affect in another may the traffic modelling.
    I mean the distance between two cars: you have safety margins between
    them but some drivers do not really follow it or the old women are too
    afraid to come closer to the car ahead …it is not forbidden to do that but
    it also affects the traffic (fluidity). (Expert 3)

    The experts’ acknowledgment of the mixed human and technical
problems (failures, breakdowns) in intelligent systems is important for the
topic of maintenance and repair insofar it suggests that failing and sup-
port (also in the sense of coping with failures) represents a matter of dis-
tributed decision and action in which drivers must accomplish themselves
some functions of system support. In particular, it is emphasized that
humans should remain “actively involved in car operation”. Expert 3
stresses that humans should still play the biggest role in driving because
“at the present the car alone still cannot follow the traffic rules and inter-
act with other cars alone”.

4.2.2. How Does an Advanced Assistance System Fail? And how
   can its Failing be Recognized and Handled?

   Usually the failures of conventional technology can easily be perceived
and their causality understood. On the contrary, the failing of intelligent
technology is not always immediately visible and manifest. Complex
72                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

technological systems feature high nonlinearity, fact that makes the com-
prehension of the impact of a minor failure on the functioning of systems
of systems (such as aircrafts) difficult. In addition, some bad parts or pro-
cesses could be automatically detected by intelligent supervision instances
and repaired without involving the end-users. As Expert 7 remarks, there
are soft failures, where the performance goes below a specific threshold
but the system still functions and the problems are not perceived by us-
ers, and system breakdowns, which are fully perceptible by users. Failures
can also be intermittent, therefore the real-time monitoring of failures and
fault detection are crucial.
    The possible failures of driving assistance systems range from poor
vehicle stabilization to navigation information that is not correlated with
the external context of driving and with the context-based behaviour of
the driver. Referring to navigation systems, the interviewed technology
designers emphasize that drivers should preserve their awareness and
concentration to the road events and properly reason about the infor-
mation received from the driving information/navigation systems:

     Navigation systems… sometimes give you this direction and this direction
     is forbidden, you cannot go there. It is maybe because the maps are not
     updated, therefore the humans should be always aware about this … if the
     navigation tells you to go to the right you should not trust it completely…
     You see with your eyes that you can’t go to the right. (Expert 4)

    Next to such information flops in the databases of navigation systems,
a variety of errors and failures may occur at the tactical and operational
levels of driving.

     If the system fails, you have a catastrophe. In airplanes, if technology fails
     they usually move to maneuver mode. In automatic cars they should have
     such a possibility, for example the car should stop suddenly…alarm or call
     police/emergency should have procedures when accidents or problems
     happen. So the idea is also to use technology to call the police, this is also
     automated. They know the position of your car and can intervene. (Expert
     4)

     Referring to auto-braking:

     As I gave you this example of auto-braking when the car suddenly comes
     closer to another car, then it brakes automatically… maybe some drivers
     really rely on their cars that they really brake. When, something in the sys-
     tem is wrong, they crash together. (Expert 3)

     About the parking assistant:

     The sensors have uncertainty and usually normal people are nor really
     good in information technology and they think that the systems and sen-
Mitrea                                                                              73
    sors are 100% accurate, which is not always the case. (Expert 3)

    Or: “You get messages that your engines are not working, but they are
really working and you don’t know what to do!”(Expert 5).
    As the quotations above highlight, failures often involve a chain of
misunderstandings between humans and technology, ranging from confu-
sions of intentionality (technology usually does not accurately grasp the
goal of humans) to the overreliance of humans in technology (drivers are
sure that the ADAS will function properly all the time). These tensions
between humans and technology are complicated by the reality of mod-
ern drivers as laymen who cannot understand anymore “why” things go
wrong inside the complex car.
    The experts emphasize that particularly the operational failures (relat-
ed to the driving on the road) should be handled through the possibility
to switch to human control or to automatically involve the repair instanc-
es. Another important possibility is through the own systems’ supervision
and control:

    Nowadays, if you don’t follow the technology you’ll miss everything (talk-
    ing about the usage of computer to check malfunctioning). Now a screen
    is connected and you can see which part is damaged. It depends what you
    want to change or repair. If a tire is kaput the driver can change this, even
    the sensors, you can change them in principle, but checking them is made
    by the computer. It is easier not to go there but to look on the computer.
    For example now by means of the computer you can know how the CPU
    is working, the state of the hard memory, you should not look inside any-
    more. (Expert 4)

    The opinion that drivers, even if they are monitored by the car sys-
tems, should place themselves in the active position of a watchful trust in
intelligent technological systems is shared by the majority of the inter-
viewed experts. Drivers should gain trust from the long-term functioning
of systems without grave errors, at the same time keeping an open eye on
what is happening on the streets and in their cars. Such distributiveness
of attention and concentration on different areas is not a simple job and
contributes to the worsening of the information overload:

    The driver should not really be outside of this. You can give the role to the
    system alone, but they (drivers) should be aware that the system can make
    mistakes… (Expert 4, opinion shared also by experts 2 and 5)

    Even if it is desired that drivers should be able to supervise the system:

    This could prove sometimes difficult since there are not always signs such
    as red lights (in the car) that may warn drivers that something starts to be
    wrong with the system. (id.)
74                                                              Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)




5. Discussion

5.1. Maintaining and Repairing Intelligent Technology… or
Humans?

     The current paper has explored the representations of technology de-
signers about advanced driver assistance, failures in intelligent driving,
and failure mitigation strategies (who, how, with, what consequences).
The expectation has been to identify a dominant view about the instances
and possibilities for control and handling of failures that is inscribed in
the process of the development of advanced technologies for driver sup-
port. To check this expectation, the results of the interviews have been
corroborated with the examination of the state-of-the art technology de-
velopment.
     According to the findings, one important function of the advanced
driver assistance technology is to ensure that human drivers and driving
remain within the desired borders of functionality. This function is dis-
tributed on technology and humans. Advanced drivers assistance and
particularly driver and driving monitoring systems can be regarded from
the perspective of the maintenance and repair topic as forms of “real-time
maintenance and repair of drivers”. This occurs through the interaction
of humans with technology at both latent (technology seaminglessly ob-
serves human driving behaviors and states through sensors) and manifest
(the artificial agents communicate with humans and vice versa) levels.
     The classification below concerns mainly the goals of this type of
M&R and is inspired from the maintenance categories of informatics sys-
tems including: the corrective maintenance (repairing of errors, modifica-
tions of systems to repair errors in design, programming or implementa-
tion), adaptive (ensuring the functioning of the system in various chang-
ing conditions), perfective (related mainly to the system improvement,
new developments), and the continuous support (Alkhatib, 1992). Par-
tially borrowing these terms above, the real-time M&R of drivers can in-
clude
     A corrective and preventive M&R:

     ⎯   The automatic recognition of errors, traffic violations, and dangerous
          driver states, warning (with further possibility of takeover, automatic
          braking, stop, etc.);
     ⎯   The maintenance of drivers in a safe state (awake, aware, concentrated)
          or the enhancement of their context awareness through louder music,
          automatic adaptation of the car environment (light, temperature).

      Perfective maintenance: understood as the extension of human sens-
      es to the in-car and out-car perspectives not available before
Mitrea                                                                         75
    Restrictive maintenance: the lift out of humans from decisions and ac-
tions if the technological monitoring systems automatically classify human
states and reactions as risky in a given context.
    The intelligent technological assistance understood as “support of
human perception, reasoning and actions” (Expert 7) implies that hu-
mans remain in the centre of technological actions and assume a variety of
responsibilities. In the circle of reciprocal monitoring in Figure 1 the ac-
tivities of monitoring and fault detection are thus distributed on humans
and technology (Figure 1).
                                         	
  




                                                                                    	
  

 Fig. 1 – The technology script about the reciprocal technology-human monitoring.


    The technological monitoring contains various actions such as sensing,
data collection, interpretation of information, warning, correction, en-
hancement and restriction. Some of them require an open interaction
with humans, others occur automatically. At their turn drivers give desti-
nations and missions, supervise the car controls, interpret the information
in function of the driving context, try to preserve their situational aware-
ness on the road, and (still) drive. A human monitoring of technology
functioning is still necessary, even if at a non-expert, superficial level. In
driverless cars it is possible that this action range is greatly modified, with
the elimination of some actions and decisions and the insistence of the
preservation of awareness (doing other things while focusing on the road
and technology). There is place for creativity and improvisation in this
domain. One such possibility commented by Büscher et al. (2011) refers
to participatory sensing. Even the passive car inhabitants of the driverless
76                                                           Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

cars can be endowed with abilities to “sense” their environment and its
functioning and to collaboratively contribute to a user-based mutual ad-
justment of actions and collaborative mobility. The monitoring of a smart
system can benefit from the ability of drivers of “reading” the situation
and to be creative about this.
    It can be concluded that the perspective on maintenance and repair as
distributed reciprocal monitoring can represent a good topic for the soci-
ological analysis of the technological co-action in intelligent socio-
technical systems (Rammert and Schulz-Schaeffer 2002; Rammert 2007;
Weyer 2009; Weyer and Schulz-Schaeffer 2009; Weyer et al. 2015). Par-
ticularly “automobilities become more and more hybrid entities in which
intelligence and intentionality are distributed between human and non-
human in ways that are increasingly isseparable: the governance of cars is
no longer in the hands of driver but is assisted by more and more techno-
logical add-ons to the point where it becomes akin to a Latourian dele-
gate” (Thrift 2004, 49). Also information infrastructures “are often
shaped and intertwined with networks of distributed agency” (Mongili
and Pellegrino 2014, xxi). In this context of hybridization answers have
to be given about who/what maintains and repairs the hybrid actor
(Latour 2006) human-car, or, at a higher level, the “heterogeneous con-
stellation of the intelligent transportation system” (Rammert 2007).
    The growing intervention of artificial agents in the daily life and the
eventual triumphal march of driving robots will make necessary the em-
pirical investigation of the co-agency of intelligent technology. The expec-
tation is that this will give concrete evidence to its status as a symmetrical
actant in the Actor-Network-Theory sense (Latour 2006, 488). It will be-
come more obvious that agency does not represents only the realm of
humans, but a connection of actants (ibid, 490) involved in driving, tech-
nical failures, and co-monitoring jobs. Recent experiments with an agent-
based computer simulation show that human test persons indeed attrib-
ute agency to the technical systems” (Fink and Weyer 2014, 47). If driv-
ing robots and artificial agents in recommender systems are perceived by
users as communicative counterparts and partners in decisions and ac-
tions then it makes sense to put questions and do research about the con-
crete parts that are ascribed to each of them in M&R. Fink and Weyer
report about a computer simulation based on an own sociological model
called HMSE, allowing them to perform interactive experiments and to
observe the issue of distributed agency empirically by identifying the sets
of actions performed by humans/technology and ascribing an agency val-
ue to them (Fink and Weyer 2014, 60). This approach can stimulate fu-
ture experiments on the topic of the distribution of roles/agency in the
M&R of advanced system-technologies.
Mitrea                                                                          77
5.2. Directions for Future Research

    The current empirical study represents the explorative phase of a larg-
er future project that aims at interviewing a larger sample of designers
working in various ITS projects. A particular attention will be paid to the
consideration of the opinions of female experts, in order to properly con-
sider the impact of gender on the studied topic.
    The presented perspective on M&R has the potential of opening new
research directions about the problems of monitoring and the chances of
advanced technological assistance of humans in general.
    A possible problem induced by the technological monitoring of hu-
man functionality is the “preventive avoidance of failures” (Weyer 2005)
induced by these systems. This could negatively affect the knowledge and
the strategic abilities of humans to plan their decisions and reactions in
advance. Therefore design strategies to avoid this are required from fu-
ture research. In relation to intelligent transportations systems it is
stressed that the distributiveness of perception, reasoning/decisions and
activities on humans and machines in future socio-technical constellations
of driving should leave room for human self-initiative; own responsibility;
control of personal data; intervention capacity; and the human decision
about the real usefulness of applications (Rammert 2007).
    The consideration of maintenance and repair as real-time correction,
enhancement and repair of human functioning does not only concern the
advanced technologies for driving but also other technological systems,
which aim at assisting humans in various fields, such as Ambient Assisted
Living, Remote Health Care Systems. A comparative analysis of these sys-
tems from the maintenance and repair perspective could represent a cap-
tivating topic for future research.


Acknowledgements

    I would like to offer my special thanks to all my colleagues from The Trans-
portation Informatics Group, University of Klagenfurt for the kind and stimulat-
ing support of this research.



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