Les véhicules modernes sont équipés de périphériques permettant d'automatiser des tâches (changement de vitesse de transmission, régulation de vitesse, etc.) ou de fournir des services à l'utilisateur (aide à la conduite, détection d'obstacles, etc.). Les communications entre les véhicules permettent d'élargir ces services grâce à la collaboration de plusieurs véhicules (prévention des accidents, gestion du trafic routier, etc.). La multiplication de ces périphériques, de leurs interfaces et protocoles rend l'échange de données plus complexe. Par ailleurs, la communication inter- véhicules est plus contraignante à cause de la haute mobilité des véhicules. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons la conception d'un canal de communication Connect to All (C2A) qui permet d'assurer l'interopérabilité entre les périphériques embarqués dans un véhicule. En effet, il détecte la connexion à chaud d'un équipement, le reconnaît et lui permet d'échanger des données avec les autres périphériques connectés. La conception du canal commence par la modélisation de ce canal en utilisant deux techniques différentes (l'outil de modélisation et de vérification UPPAAL et le Langage de Description et de Spécification (LDS)). La vérification des modèles proposés a pour but de valider le fonctionnement. Ensuite, nous détaillons une implémentation réelle du canal sur une carte embarquée qui vise à démontrer la faisabilité du concept d'interopérabilité de C2A.Nous avons aussi étudié les effets de la mobilité dans la communication inter-véhiculaires grâce à une approche hybride mixant le routage et un service de localisation. Cette approche offre un mécanisme qui permet de réduire les coûts de la localisation des véhicules tout en augmentant les performances de routage. En plus, nous comparons deux applications de cette approche : Hybrid Routing and Grid Location Service (HRGLS) et Hybrid Routing and Hierarchical Location Service (HRHLS) avec des approches originelles pour démontrer la valeur ajoutée. Cette approche est enrichie avec un algorithme de prédiction de mobilité. Ce dernier permet de mieux cerner le déplacement des véhicules en les estimant. De même, l'approche hybride avec prédiction de mobilité Predictive Hybrid Routing and Hierarchical Location Service (PHRHLS) est comparée à HRHLS et l'approche originelle afin de révéler les bénéfices de la prédiction de mobilité. / Modern vehicles are equipped with various devices that aim to automate tasks (shift transmission, cruise control, etc.) or to provide services to the user (driver assistance, obstacle detection, etc.). Communications between vehicles help to expand these services through the collaboration of several vehicles (accident prevention, traffic management, etc.). The proliferation of these devices, their interfaces and protocols makes the data exchange more complex. In addition, inter-vehicle communication is more restrictive because of the vehicles' high mobility.In this work, we propose the design of a communication channel Connect to All (C2A) that ensures the interoperability between embedded devices in a vehicle. In fact, it detects the equipment connection, recognizes it and allows it to exchange data with other devices. The channel design starts by the modelling step using two different techniques (the model checker tool UPPAAL and the Specification and Description Language (SDL). Then, we validate the designed models. We also detail a concrete implementation of the channel on an embedded chip that aims to show the C2A interoperability concept feasibility.We also studied the mobility effects in the inter-vehicular communication through a hybrid approach mixing routing and location-based service. This approach provides a mechanism to reduce vehicle-tracking costs while increasing routing performances. Moreover, we compare two applications of this approach: Hybrid Routing and Grid Location Service (HRGLS) and Hybrid Routing and Hierarchical Location Service (HRHLS) with classical approaches to prove the added value. Then, this approach is improved with a mobility prediction algorithm. The latter allows a better understanding of the vehicle movements by estimating them. Similarly, the hybrid approach with mobility prediction Predictive Hybrid Routing and Hierarchical Location Service (PHRHLS) is compared with the basic approach and HRHLS in order to show the mobility prediction advantages.

South Africa provides a fascinating interface between the developed and the developing world and poses a multitude of opportunities for enhancing the sustainable development of local cities. The concept of City Logistics is concerned with the mobility of cities, and entails the process of optimizing urban logistics activities by considering the social, environmental, economic, financial, and energy impacts of urban freight movement. Vehicle routing and scheduling has the potential to address a number of these key focus areas. Applying optimization to vehicle routing and scheduling results in a reduced number of trips, better fleet utilization, and lower maintenance costs; thereby improving the financial situation of the fleet owner. Improved fleet utilization could have a positive environmental impact, while also improving the mobility of the city as a whole. Energy utilization is improved while customer satisfaction could also increase through on-time deliveries and reliability. The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well-researched problem in Operations Research literature. The main objective of this type of problem is to minimize an objective function, typically distribution cost for individual carriers. The area of application is wide, and specific variants of the VRP transform the basic problem to conform to application specific requirements. It is the view of this dissertation that the various VRP variants have been researched in isolation, with little effort to integrate various problem variants into an instance that is more appropriate to the South African particularity with regards to logistics and vehicle routing. Finding a feasible, and integrated initial solution to a hard problem is the first step in addressing the scheduling issue. This dissertation attempts to integrate three specific variants: multiple time windows, a heterogeneous fleet, and double scheduling. As the problem is burdened with the added constraints, the computational effort required to find a solution increases. The dissertation therefore also contributes to reducing the computational burden by proposing a concept referred to as time window compatibility to intelligently evaluate the insertion of customers on positions within routes. The initial solution algorithm presented proved feasible for the integration of the variants, while the time window compatibility decreased the computational burden by 25%, and as much as 80% for specific customer configurations, when using benchmark data sets from literature. The dissertation also improved the quality of the initial solution, for example total distance traveled, by 13%. Finding an initial solution is the first step in solving vehicle routing problems. The second step is to improve the initial solution iteratively through an improvement heuristic in an attempt to find a global optimum. Although the improvement heuristic falls outside the scope of this dissertation, improvement of the initial solution has a significant impact on the quality of improvement heuristics, and is therefore a valuable contribution. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Industrial and Systems Engineering / MEng / Unrestricted

Les avancées technologiques, dues à l’avènement des nouvelles technologies d’information etde communication, ont donné naissance au concept des Systèmes de Transport Intelligents (STI).Les objectifs de telles applications consistent à apporter des solutions efficaces pour faire face auxproblèmes quotidiens des phénomènes de congestion. L’importance ainsi que les enjeux socioéconomiquesposés par les congestions imposent d’introduire des solutions innovantes utilisantles avancées récentes dans le domaine de la commande. Les travaux présentés dans cette thèse sesituent dans le cadre des STI et traitent des problèmes de la commande du trafic autoroutier et surles Voies Rapides Urbaines (VRU). Parmi les techniques de commande utilisée, nos travaux se focalisentprincipalement sur le contrôle d’accès isolé. L’objectif d’une telle action de régulation estd’agir sur le débit des rampes d’entrée, via des feux de signalisation, afin de maintenir la densitésur la voie principale aux alentours d’un seuil critique permettant ainsi, une utilisation optimale del’infrastructure autoroutière ou des VRU. L’algorithme proposé repose sur l’utilisation conjointede la platitude différentielle et le concept de la commande par mode glissant d’ordre supérieur. Laprincipale caractéristique de la platitude réside dans sa capacité à assurer une génération de trajectoiressans intégration d’aucune équation différentielle du modèle étudié. L’intérêt de la commandepar mode glissant d’ordre supérieur est de permettre le suivi de trajectoires d’une manière robustemême en présence d’incertitudes et de perturbations typiques aux systèmes de trafic. La pertinencede l’approche proposée est validée via un ensemble de simulations avec des données réelles d’uneportion de l’autoroute A6 du périphérique de Paris. De plus, la validation a été enrichie par l’évaluationde performances basée sur des critères couramment utilisés par les exploitants. L’ensembledes résultats ouvre la voie à plusieurs perspectives d’amélioration et de généralisation de cettecommande à des réseaux routiers plus complexes. / The technological advances, due to the advent of the new information and communication technologieshave given rise to the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) concept. The objectivesof such applications are to provide effective solutions to deal with the daily problems of congestion.The importance as well as the socio-economic challenges raised by congestion requires theintroduction of innovative solutions based on the latest advances in the automatic control field. Theworks presented in this thesis lie in the frame of ITS and treat the problems of the freeway andUrban Express Routes (UER) control. Among the used control techniques, our works focus mainlyon the isolated ramp metering. The objective of this control measurement is to act on the on-rampflow, through traffic lights, in order to keep the traffic density on the mainstream section around acritical threshold allowing then an optimal use of the freeway or UER infrastructures. The proposedalgorithm rests on the jointly use of differential flatness and high order sliding mode control(HOSMC) concept. The main characteristic of the differential flatness lies in its ability to providea trajectory generation, without integration of any differential equation of the studied model. Onthe other hand, the advantage of HOSMC is to allow a robust trajectory tracking even in the case ofthe presence of uncertainties and disturbances which are typical to traffic systems. The relevanceof the proposed approach is validated through a set of numerical simulations using real-data froma part of the A6 freeway from Paris ring. In addition, the validation step has been enriched by theperformance evaluation based on a set of criteria commonly used by the freeway practitioners. Theobtained results paves the way to several perspectives in order to improve the proposed controlapproach and its generalization for more complex freeway networks.

La thèse porte sur le contrôle des systèmes de systèmes (SdS) et, sur la manière de construire des SdS adaptables et fiables. Ce travail fait partie du laboratoire d’excellence Labex MS2T sur le développement des SdS technologiques. Les SdS sont des systèmes complexes constitués de plusieurs systèmes indépendants qui fonctionnent ensemble pour atteindre un objectif commun. L’ingénierie des SdS est une approche qui se concentre sur la manière de construire et de concevoir des SdS fiables capables de s’adapter à l’environnement dynamique dans lequel ils évoluent. Compte tenu de l’importance du contrôle des systèmes constituants (SC) pour atteindre les objectifs du SdS , la première partie de cette thèse a consisté en une étude bibliographique sur le sujet du contrôle des SdS. Certaines méthodes de contrôle existent pour les systèmes à grande échelle et les systèmes multi-agents, à savoir, le contrôle hiérarchique, distribué et décentralisé peuvent être utiles et sont utilisés pour contrôler les SdS. Ces méthodes ne conviennent pas pour contrôler un SdS dans sa globalité et son évolution, en raison de l’indépendance de leur SC ; alors que les “frameworks” multi-vues conviennent mieux à cet objectif. Une approche de ”framework” générale est proposée pour modéliser et gérer les interactions entre les SC dans un SdS. La deuxième partie de notre travail a consisté à contribuer aux systèmes de transport intelligent. À cette fin, nous avons proposé le gestionnaire de manœuvres coopératives pour les véhicules autonomes (CMMAV), un “framework” qui guide le développement des applications coopératives dans les véhicules autonomes. Pour valider le CMMAV, nous avons développé le gestionnaire de manœuvres latérales coopératives (CLMM), une application sur les véhicules autonomes qui permet d’échanger des demandes afin de coopérer lors de manœuvres de dépassement sur autoroute. Cette application a été validée par des scénarios formels, des simulations informatiques, et testée sur les véhicules autonomes du projet Robotex au laboratoire Heudiasyc. / This thesis focuses on System of Systems (SoS) control, and how to build adaptable and reliable SoS. This work is part of the Labex MS2T laboratory of excellence on technological SoS development. SoS are complex systems that consist of multiple independent systems that work together to achieve a common goal. SoS Engineering is an approach that focuses on how to build and design reliable SoS that can adapt to the dynamic environment in which they operate. Given the importance of controlling constituent systems (CS) in order to achieve SoS objectives, the first part of this thesis involved a literature study about the subject of SoS control. Some control methods exist for large-scale systems and multi-agent systems, namely, hierarchical, distributed, and decentralized control might be useful and are used to control SoS. These methods are not suitable for controlling SoS in its whole, because of the independence of their CS; whereas, multi-views frameworks are more suitable for this objective. A general framework approach is proposed to model and manage the interactions between CS in a SoS. The second part of our work consisted of contributing to Intelligent Transportation Systems. For this purpose, we have proposed the Cooperative Maneuvers Manager for Autonomous Vehicles (CMMAV), a framework that guides the development of cooperative applications in autonomous vehicles. To validate the CMMAV, we have developed the Cooperative Lateral Maneuvers Manager (CLMM), an application on the autonomous vehicles that enables equipped vehicles to exchange requests in order to cooperate during overtaking maneuvers on highways. It was validated by formal scenarios, computer simulations, and tested on the autonomous vehicles of the Equipex Robotex in Heudiasyc laboratory.

abstract: Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have recently enabled novel applications such as passenger transport and package delivery, but are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack and therefore difficult to certify. Legacy systems such as GPS provide these capabilities extremely well, but are sensitive to spoofing and hijacking. An alternative intelligent transport system (ITS) was developed that provides highly secure communications, positioning, and timing synchronization services to networks of cooperative RF users, termed Communications and High-Precision Positioning (CHP2) system. This technology was implemented on consumer-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and it offers rapid (<100 ms) and precise (<5 cm) positioning capabilities in over-the-air experiments using flexible ground stations and UAS platforms using limited bandwidth (10 MHz). In this study, CHP2 is considered in the context of safety-critical and resource limited transport applications and urban air mobility. The two-way ranging (TWR) protocol over a joint positioning-communications waveform enables distributed coherence and time-of-flight(ToF) estimation. In a multi-antenna setup, the cross-platform ranging on participating nodes in the network translate to precise target location and orientation. In the current form, CHP2 necessitates a cooperative timing exchange at regular intervals. Dynamic resource management supports higher user densities by constantly renegotiating spectral access depending on need and opportunity. With these novel contributions to the field of integrated positioning and communications, CHP2 is a suitable candidate to provide both communications, navigation, and surveillance (CNS) and alternative positioning, navigation, and timing (APNT) services for high density safety-critical transport applications on a variety of vehicular platforms. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2020

With the increasing highlighted security concerns in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), Vision-based Automated Vehicle Recognition (VAVR) has attracted considerable attention recently. A comprehensive VAVR system contains three components: Vehicle Detection (VD), Vehicle Make and Model Recognition (VMMR), and Vehicle Re-identification (VReID). These components perform coarse-to-fine recognition tasks in three steps. The VAVR system can be widely used in suspicious vehicle recognition, urban traffic monitoring, and automated driving system. Vehicle recognition is complicated due to the subtle visual differences between different vehicle models. Therefore, how to build a VAVR system that can fast and accurately recognize vehicle information has gained tremendous attention. In this work, by taking advantage of the emerging deep learning methods, which have powerful feature extraction and pattern learning abilities, we propose several models used for vehicle recognition. First, we propose a novel Recurrent Attention Unit (RAU) to expand the standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for VMMR. RAU learns to recognize the discriminative part of a vehicle on multiple scales and builds up a connection with the prominent information in a recurrent way. The proposed ResNet101-RAU achieves excellent recognition accuracy of 93.81% on the Stanford Cars dataset and 97.84% on the CompCars dataset. Second, to construct efficient vehicle recognition models, we simplify the structure of RAU and propose a Lightweight Recurrent Attention Unit (LRAU). The proposed LRAU extracts the discriminative part features by generating attention masks to locate the keypoints of a vehicle (e.g., logo, headlight). The attention mask is generated based on the feature maps received by the LRAU and the preceding attention state generated by the preceding LRAU. Then, by adding LRAUs to the standard CNN architectures, we construct three efficient VMMR models. Our models achieve the state-of-the-art results with 93.94% accuracy on the Stanford Cars dataset, 98.31% accuracy on the CompCars dataset, and 99.41% on the NTOU-MMR dataset. In addition, we construct a one-stage Vehicle Detection and Fine-grained Recognition (VDFG) model by combining our LRAU with the general object detection model. Results show the proposed VDFG model can achieve excellent performance with real-time processing speed. Third, to address the VReID task, we design the Compact Attention Unit (CAU). CAU has a compact structure, and it relies on a single attention map to extract the discriminative local features of a vehicle. We add two CAUs to the truncated ResNet to construct a small but efficient VReID model, ResNetT-CAU. Compared with the original ResNet, the model size of ResNetT-CAU is reduced by 60%. Extensive experiments on the VeRi and VehicleID dataset indicate the proposed ResNetT-CAU achieve the best re-identification results on both datasets. In summary, the experimental results on the challenging benchmark VMMR and VReID datasets indicate our models achieve the best VMMR and VReID performance, and our models have a small model size and fast image processing speed.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / Cities in the world aim to ensure the mobility of people, through the implementation of efficient Integrated Transportation Systems (ITS). This aims to improve the transport of people, which guarantees that they can be mobilized safely and without delays in the terminals and bus stops of the public transport system. The present article proposes a design of public transport stops aimed at optimizing the waiting time of users when transferring from one bus to another. For the validity of the proposal, the social force model of the Vissim program was used, where the behavior of the users within the bus stops was reflected. The results showed that the waiting times in the calibrated and validated microsimulation model were optimized by approximately 20%, which generates an improvement in the efficiency of the public transport system. / Revisión por pares

Over the past decades, congestion and emission problems has increased remarkablywhich escalates the demands on vehicles. The advancements withinthe eld of information and communication systems gives the opportunity todeal with the aforementioned problems. The concept of platooning shows tobe an attractive way of reducing both congestion and emissions by having ashort inter-vehicle spacing. The ndings in studies show that fuel reductionpotentials of 5-20 % are viable as a result of the lowered air drag by drivingin platoon. This thesis investigates the state of the art within the areaof intelligent transport systems (ITS) along with advanced driver assistancesystems (ADAS). Furthermore, the prosecuted work results in a proposedcontrol design for a longitudinal control in a platoon of vehicles. The platoonconsists of two homogeneous radio controlled vehicles (RCV) which aremodelled by taking advantage of system identication methods. The identi-ed plant models are implemented into a Simulink model where the controlsystem is developed. Moreover, the developed control system is implementedinto a real-time demonstrator for experimental evaluation. The results showsthat the modelled dynamics corresponds reasonably well with the real dynamicsof the system. The developed control system proves to work well andagree with the expectations of its performance obtained from simulations.The performance of the proposed controller has been evaluated by means ofsimulations and real experiments. The resulting control system consists ofPID controllers for both speed and spacing control. / Under de senaste decennierna har mangden trakstockningar och problemmed utslapp okat - darmed aven kraven pa vara fordon. Samtidigt skaparframstegen inom informations- och kommunikationssystem mojligheter foratt hantera ovannamnda problem. Kolonnkorning, eller platooning har visatsig vara en eektiv metod for att minska saval trakstockningar som utslappsom en foljd av kortare avstand mellan fordon. Resultat fran studier visarhur en branslereduktion runt 5-20 % ar mojlig till foljd av det sankta luftmotstandet vid kolonnkorning. Avhandlingen undersoker teknikens standpunktinom intelligenta transportsystem (ITS) tillsammans med avancerade drivhjalpsystem(ADAS). Vidare resulterar arbetet i ett forslag till regleringsdesignfor en longitudinell kontroll i en kolonn av fordon. Kolonnen bestar av tvahomogena radiostyrda fordon (RCV) som modelleras genom att utnyttjametoder for systemidentiering. De identierade systemmodellerna implementerasi en Simulink-modell dar styrsystemet utvecklas. Dessutom implementerasdet utvecklade styrsystemet i en realtids-demonstration for experimentellutvardering. Resultaten visar att den modellerade dynamikenstammer bra overens med systemets verkliga dynamik. Det utvecklade styrsystemetvisar sig fungera bra och overensstammer med forvantningarna pa dessprestanda som erhallits genom simuleringar. Den foreslagna regulatorns prestandahar utvarderats med hjalp av simuleringar och verkliga experiment.Det resulterande styrsystemet bestar av PID regulatorer for bade hastighetsochavstandskontroll.

In recent years, there has been a considerable increase in the amount of construction work on the U.S. national highways. Most of the work undertaken is the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the existing transportation networks. Work zones in the United States are likely to increase in number, duration and length due to emphasis on repair and highway reconstruction as a significant portion of all federal-aid highway funds are now geared toward highway rehabilitation. The challenge of mobility is particularly acute in work zone areas as road repair and construction intensifies traffic issues and concentrates them in specific locations and at specific times. Due to the capacity drop, which is the result of lane closure in work zone area, congestion will occur with a high traffic demand. The congestion increases number and severity of traffic conflicts which raise the potential for accidents; furthermore traffic operational properties of roadway in work zone area become worse. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technologies have been developed and are being deployed to improve the safety and mobility of traffic in and around work zones. In several states in the US, the use of Dynamic Merge Controls also known as Dynamic Lane Merge (DLM) system has been initiated to enhance traffic safety and to improve traffic flow in work zone areas. The DLM usually takes two forms; dynamic iii early merge and dynamic late merge. The use of variable speed limit (VSL) systems at work zones is also one of those measures. VSL systems improve safety by helping the driver in determining the maximum speed that drivers should travel. Besides adding improvement to safety, they are also expected to improve mobility at the work zones. The main goal of this study is to evaluate the safety and operational effectiveness of the dynamic merge systems i.e. the dynamic early lane merge and dynamic late lane merge, in the presence of VSL system. More specifically, the VISSIM model is utilized to simulate a twoto-one lane configuration when one out of the two lanes in the work zone is closed for traffic. Six different scenarios were adopted to assess the effectiveness of these scenarios under different traffic demand volumes and different drivers‟ compliance rates to the messages displayed by the systems. These scenarios are;  Work Zone without VSL and without SDLMS or the current Motorist Awareness System (MAS)  Work Zone with VSL and without SDLMS  Work Zone with VSL and Early SDLMS  Work Zone with VSL and Late SDLMS  Work Zone with early SDLMS and without VSL  Work Zone with late SDLMS and without VSL iv An already calibrated and validated VISSIM model for Simplified Dynamic Lane Merge System (SDLMS) in accordance with the real life work zone was modified with a VSL through Vehicle Actuated Programming (VAP) code. Three different logics were coded each for VSL alone, early SDLMS+VSL and late SDLMS+VSL. All these logics were fine tuned with several test runs before finalizing it for the final simulation. It is found through the simulation of above mentioned scenarios that for low and medium volume levels (V0500, V1000 and V1500), there is no significant difference between the Maintenance of Traffic (MOT) plans for mean throughputs. However, for higher volume levels (V2000 and V2500), late SDLMS with and without VSL produced higher mean throughputs for all compliance rates and truck percentages except when the demand volume was 2,500 vph and compliance of 60%, where it produces the significantly lower mean throughputs. In terms of travel time through the work zone, results indicated that there is no significant difference between MOT types for demand levels of V0500 and V1000 when compliance is 40% or less but for compliance of 60% and more, only demand volume level that is not significantly different from other MOT types is V0500. This study revealed that VSL increases travel time through the work zone. This might be due to non-compliant vehicles that follow the compliant vehicle v ahead unless they find a sufficient gap in adjacent lane to pass the compliant vehicle. It is also found out that VSL makes the system safer at higher volumes (2,000 vph and 2,500 vph). This was observed through safety surrogate measures selected for this study. Another outcome of this study is that the addition of VSL to the dynamic merge systems helps in improving the overall safety of the system by lowering speed variances and deceleration means of the vehicles travelling through the work zone. The passage of traffic through the work zone is made safer when a speed control is integrated to a dynamic merge system. It can be inferred from the simulation results that integrated SDLMS and VSL systems have better performance in terms of traffic mobility and safety than existing individual controls and also show that the integrated SDLMS and VSL system has more potential than each individual systems.

Smart environments provide users with a large number of new services that will improve their lives, however, they also have the potential for collecting staggering amounts of personal information, which, if misused, poses a multitude of privacy threats to users ranging from identification, tracking, stalking, monitoring and profiling. Consequently, the users’ right to informational self-determination is at stake in smart environments. Usable Privacy-Enhancing Identity Management (PE-IdM) can re-establish user control by offering users a selection of meaningful privacy preference settings that they could choose from. However, different privacy trade-offs need to be considered and managed for the configuration of the identity management system as well as cultural privacy aspects influencing user's privacy preferences. Guidelines for usable management of privacy settings that address varying end user preferences for control and privacy conflicting goals are needed.   The objective of this thesis is to explore approaches for enforcing usable PE-IdM for smart environments, with a focus on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). To that end, we unravel the technical state of the art regarding the problem space and solutions, as well as investigating users’ privacy preferences cross-culturally in Sweden and South Africa. We elicit requirements for achieving usable PE-IdM, which are based on usable configuration options, offering suitable selectable privacy settings that will cater for the needs and preferences of users with different cultural backgrounds.