Prospects of co-operative driving

The acronym PROMETHEUS stands for `Programme for a European Traffic with Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety´, a pre-competitive research programme launched by the European automotive industry. Here, the author deals with co-operative driving as one of the most promising but likewise most challenging concepts to ensure an adequate mobility of individual road users in the future. The basic idea is to provide for intelligent vehicles being able to self-organize their local driving manoeuvres in a co-operative manner without requiring minute guidance and control from traffic management facilities. The expected benefits of this approach are considerably enhanced traffic safety and traffic efficiency as well, where the underlying assumption is that co-operative vehicles have a better perception of and superior operating behaviour in a given traffic environment than individual vehicles driving according to differing autonomous strategies