Guest Editorial: Holistic Approaches for Human–Vehicle Systems: Combining Models, Interactions, and Control

The deep interlace between drivers and vehicles implies that human factors are of utmost importance in vehicle safety research, and consideration motivates study of critical interactions of the driver, the vehicle, and the environment. Much of the focus of human factors experts in transportation safety has been on the evaluation of driver’s capabilities to take advantage of emerging in-vehicle technologies. This approach raises interesting challenges associated with characterization and modeling of human behaviors, particularly with respect to cognition and neuromuscular dynamics, and their implication in closed-loop driver–vehicle performance. This Special Issue (SI) was conceived to bring together recent and innovative views on the aforementioned emerging topics. The SI raised significant interest in the research community and received 67 total submissions, of which seven were under revision or awaiting final scores at the deadline for publication. Consequently, these submissions do not appear in this issue (if the papers are accepted, they will be published in a regular issue of the journal). Of the initial submissions, five received an immediate reject decision and seven were rejected after review. All others proceeded further in the review process, with different review decisions and numbers of revisions; thus, indicating the high quality of work that was submitted. After evaluation of the final accepted papers, which met the production deadlines, 12 works were selected to appear in the SI. These papers are representative of the different aspects of human–vehicle systems that have been previously discussed; ten are Regular Papers and two are Technical Correspondences, which appear at the end of the issue. The papers are briefly summarized.