Analysis and Control of Socio-Cultural Opinion Evolution in Complex Social Systems

The overarching goal of this thesis is to further our understanding about opinion evolution in networked societies. Such insights can be used in a variety of fields such as economy, marketing, transportation, egress, etc. Three main subjects build up this interdisciplinary research: Sociology, Statistical Mechanics, and Network Sciences. In this thesis, for macrolevel (or society-level) analyses, techniques from statistical mechanics have been borrowed to mathematically model the opinion dynamic on different network topologies based on different interaction models. Also, for micro-level (individual-level) analyses, Individual Decision Making Algorithms (IDMA) have been designed. To account for both macro-level and micro-level dynamics, these two regimes are combined resulting in a more accurate model for opinion propagation. Assessing the controllability of such dynamics through experiments in presence of actual humans is the part of this thesis

Driving Simulator Motion Cueing Assessment: A Platform Design Perspective

The overall aim of this thesis was to study the effects of a simulator’s motion system on vestibular motion cueing fidelity in different contexts, evaluated in terms of drivers’ perception and behaviour, in low and high road friction conditions. The effects of manipulating the motion cueing algorithm (MCA), was found to be a function of the vehicle motion in a manoeuvre, and significant effects were observed. The applicability of simulators for the assessment of vehicle driven attribute qualities such as ride, steering and handling were studied by manipulating vehicle ride height (RH). The differences between the RHs were subjectively distinguishable by the drivers in the simulator. Incongruities between the subjective preferences and objective performances were observed in both of the independent comparisons of the MCAs and RHs. The effects of motion platform (MP) workspace size were found to be dependent on the manoeuvres and road friction level. In the low-friction condition, with the increase of MP size, two opposite effects were observed on drivers’ preferences and their performances, depending on the manoeuvre. In high-friction, in most of the handling and steering qualities, a direct relation was found between the MP size and appropriate vehicle RH. Furthermore, the optimal tuning of the MCAs and optimisation of the MP workspace size was introduced. A conservative motion cueing fidelity criteria was defined. A multi-layered optimisation method was developed that uses the optimal setting of the MCA, to address the MP translational workspace size, and to meet the fidelity criteria; applicable for different manoeuvres. This method was tested on the drivers’ performance data collected from the experiments in the simulator