Editorial

Advanced vehicle control technologies have been introduced to modern vehicles at a rapid pace to improve vehicle safety and performance. It is believed that such technologies will be integrated with the intelligent transportation and information infrastructure to elevate the overall efficiency and productivity of ground vehicles. The International Symposium on Advanced Vehicle Control is a leading vehicle control conference held biennially since 1992. The main objective of this symposium is to provide the opportunity for engineers and researchers in the field to communicate and exchange ideas about the state-of-the-art development of vehicle dynamics with advanced control and electronic systems.

The 8th International Symposium on Advanced VEhicle Control (AVEC ’06) was held at Taipei, Taiwan from August 20 to 24 in 2006. The symposium consists of 4 keynotes and 163 research papers, focusing on the following themes:

1. Vehicle Dynamics and Control,

2. Advanced Vehicle Propulsion,

3. Intelligent Driver Assistance, and

4. Automotive IC and Electronics.

These papers have been selected on the basis of the judgment from the International Scientific Committee on the criteria of importance, interest, novelty, accuracy, originality, completeness, clarity, and organization. The final papers were submitted from 18 countries, categorized in 40 technical areas, which were presented orally in 5 parallel sessions in the symposium for three days. Among these contributions, the International Scientific Committee has selected some of the best papers for further evaluation and publication in this special issue of Vehicle System Dynamics.

Six papers were finally chosen and are presented here to cover the four themes of this symposium. Two of them are keynote papers, presented by Prof. Hedrick at UC Berkeley about the Advanced Vehicle Propulsion and Prof. Nagai at Tokyo University of A&T about the Intelligent Driver Assistance. The other four papers were final candidates of the best paper awards. They are written by Tseng et al at Ford Motor Co., Marumo et al at Nihon University, Yi et al at Seoul National University, and Peng et al at Southern Taiwan University of Technology.

I would like to express my gratitude to the authors and all the reviewers who helped to improve the quality of this special issue. There are still many excellent papers presented in the symposium that we have missed due to the page limit. These papers are welcome to submit to the normal issues of Vehicle System Dynamics because we share the copyright between the AVEC and the VSD. We hope that you will enjoy the contents of this special issue and wish you have a great success in your research.