ICT Infrastructure for Cooperative, Connected and Automated Transport in Transition Areas

Kurzfassung

One of the challenges of automated road transport is to manage the coexistence of conventional and highly automated vehicles, in order to ensure an uninterrupted level of safety and efficiency. Vehicles driving at a higher automation level may have to change to a lower level of automation in a certain area under certain circumstances and certain (e.g. road and weather) conditions. The paper targets the transition phases between different levels of automation. It will review related research, introduce a concept to investigate automation level changes, present some recent research results, i.e. assessing key performance indicators for both analysing driver behaviour and traffic management in light of autonomous vehicles, an initial simulation architecture, and address further research topics on investigation of the traffic management in such areas (called "Transition Areas") when the automation level changes, and development of traffic management procedures and protocols to enable smooth coexistence of automated, cooperative, connected vehicles and conventional vehicles, especially in an urban environment.