Eliciting User Needs of Intelligent Transportation Systems in the Context of Autonomous Driving: An Application of Activity Theory

Properly elicit the user needs is of vital importance for the development of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This study proposed a theoretical framework for user needs elicitation based on the activity theory, which includes a three-level hierarchical structure to decompose the travel activity and a contradiction theory to explain the user need evolution. The proposed framework was applied to reconstruct the user needs in Architecture Reference for Cooperative and Intelligent Transportation (ARC-IT). A total of 518 user needs were matched to the hierarchical model and the possible evolutions of user needs corresponding to different levels of driving automation were captured by the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary contradictions. Such a framework can help to elicit user needs for the next generation of ITS dominated by autonomous and connected vehicle technologies.