Abstract
Research and Engineering questions/objectives
Vehicle and Road Automation (VRA) is a support action funded by the European Union and coordinated by ERTICO that addresses the identified deployment needs from different perspectives: the deployment scenarios, the legal and regulatory needs and finally the standardisation and certification requirements. In particular, the role of the digital infrastructure has been underlined and our contribution in VRA is to emphasize the importance of the physical infrastructure and its link with the digital infrastructure. Our fifteen years’ experience in development of automated vehicle has demonstrated that the physical infrastructure is a major issue to ensure the overall system safety and reliability. Indeed, to move safely, vehicles will need an accurate knowledge of the state of the road on which they are travelling. Automated vehicles are expecting from infrastructure that it fulfils some requirement in order to maximize safety. Generally speaking, the infrastructure must be “readable” by the vehicle. The objective of this paper is to investigate the concept of High Quality of Service Highway (HQoSH).
HQoSH itself is part of more generic system that encompasses not only driving automation but all other services that can be provided by the road in the future and that are summarized by a more generic concept known in France as “Fifth Generation Road” and in Europe as “Forever Open Road”.
Methodology
Driving automation must be seen from a systemic point of view. Our holistic approach consists in considering driving automation as a system that includes vehicles, physical architecture, digital architecture and their relationship supported by V2I, I2V communication. First at all, the infrastructure must provide the vehicle with high lane marking quality such as in‐ vehicle perception system will be able to detect them and then accurately locate the vehicle on the road. But there are many other road features which are contributing to enhance or alter safety. It concerns: road geometry, road surface degradation, road skid resistance, geometric visibility etc. Some of these features affect directly vehicles dynamics, other impact their ability to anticipate some potentially critical situation. Consequently, an automated vehicle will move safely on a given road under the condition that the above mentioned features will have characteristics of which values are enclosed within some limits namely the infrastructure metrics.
Results
In this paper after defining infrastructure feature and their metrics we will show how the digital infrastructure can reflect the physical infrastructure state. It relies on data that has to be collected and analyzed by road networks operators. The classical approach consists in using road network operator services vehicles which periodically patrols along the itinerary. However, a more innovative solution consists in using the automated vehicles themselves as probe vehicles. Then infrastructure features must be provided to vehicles. Therefore, we will distinguish three class of variability in road features: static, temporary and dynamic and for each of them we will examine how the information can be provided to the vehicle. Finally, we will propose a scenario that will illustrate how HQoSH will contribute to optimize automated vehicle safety.
What does the paper offer that is new in the field including in comparison to other work by the authors?
This paper offers a holistic approach of driving automation. It will demonstrate the strong link between vehicles, physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure and the cooperative systems. The physical infrastructure must comply with what is expected by the vehicles to ensure a given level of safety. In addition, the digital infrastructure must reflect at any time the current state of the physical infrastructure. This is made possible thanks to cooperative systems.
Conclusion
Up to now, most of the works dedicated to autonomous vehicles are focused on the vehicle itself or on the digital infrastructure. As a result, it appears that the world or OEMs and the world of road network operator have difficulties to communicate and exchange their respective expectation one from each other. This paper is an attempt to break this separation. The paper will conclude with recommendations towards OEM and road network operators.
Keywords: automated vehicle, physical architecture, digital architecture, highway automation, probe vehicle, cooperative systems, V2I communication, reliability, safety