Impact of ICT-mediated collective awareness on urban mobility

Background Understanding the influence of Information and Communication Technologiess (ICTs) on humans’ social behavior is an interesting and important research topic. “What behavioral change is expected in an ICT mediated society?”, is one of the typical research questions, most widely explored (Mitleton-Kelly 2013). Reaction of people to innovation in general and the consequence of this reaction in relation with social analogies is discussed in (Straub 2009). It is observed that people trust on their abilities more as compared to those of the system (de Vries et al. 2003). However, it needs to be evaluated. In particular, the interplay between the notion of self and the ICT induced information towards awareness of phenomena of interest, is an interesting area to investigate. It becomes even more interesting in a scenario where a user is unwillingly influenced by its surrounding. However, it can only be achieved if the role of individual in a collective behavior is understood. Individual factors must be identified and linked-up to facilitate the emergence of a global norm (Ferscha 2014; Ferscha et al. 2012). Abstract Purpose: This paper studies the influence of information and communication technologies on human reasoning and decision making. It investigates the potential impact of ambient intelligence on change in pedestrian mobility behavior, using a large city-scale scenario. Methods: This work establishes an interplay between social and technological aspects of awareness by augmenting a model-driven framework of a realistic information eco-system. A distributed multi-agent system is developed to model a real-life urban mobility environment. The model is then simulated using a large scale parallel computing platform. Results: Evaluation results revealed that the quality of information in ambient-assisted environments increases when compared with those without ambient intelligence. Conclusion: We conclude that there is a positive correlation between the extent of information being shared in a socially-inspired information eco-systems and the level of collective awareness in an urban mobility scenario.