The Future of … Self-driving vehicles

Numerous pilot projects, but what happens next?

One of the most ground-breaking innovations that will need to be addressed by the public transport sector over the next few years is the introduction and availability of self-driving vehicles. It is hoped they will bring about mobility for everyone at any time and in any location once the necessary technology is available.

Numerous ongoing and completed research and development projects have focused on this. These projects essentially deal with two key issues:

 

  • How do we ensure that vehicles can actually be driven without a driver?
  • Which business cases will result from this?

Efforts are focused on automated driving

With regard to business cases, the focus so far has been on operating concepts where the vehicle’s driver is the main cost factor. Self-driving vehicles can make a fundamental contribution to the implementation of these concepts. In particular, this applies to on-demand transport serving rural areas or feeding fixed-route services, forming the backbone of urban transport.

However, due to the complexities of these concepts, even when the legal and social issues have been resolved, the technology will require further extensive development before drivers can be replaced entirely. This is proven by the fact that more and more research is being carried out in the field of automated driving (where the vehicle is driven by the technology, but where the driver must remain on standby to take over) and less research is being carried out on autonomous driving (completely driverless).

The current Swedish research project iQMobility focuses on what IT integration could look like for self-driving vehicles. It quickly became clear that there is a good distribution of roles and responsibilities between transport companies and vehicle manufacturers. During this project, with INIT’s involvement, an architecture was developed where the vehicle manufacturer assumes responsibility for the actual driving (role: driving) and the transport company has responsibility for the route and its stop points (role: movement command). There are corresponding IT systems for both roles, for which communication interfaces have been identified, specified and prototypically implemented.

The missing social component of driverless vehicles

However, the project also made it clear that driving is not in fact the drivers’ only role. They have numerous other tasks, such as ticket sales, access control (managing passengers boarding the vehicle) and monitoring the passenger compartment. If there is no driver onboard the vehicle, then technical equipment would be required to assume these tasks.

For tasks such as ticket sales, there are already technical solutions in the form of ticket vending machines or mobile applications. However, there are currently no comprehensive technological solutions for access control or so-called social control, which is only exercised by the presence of the driver. The quest for technological solutions to replace these other functions and tasks will require a huge amount of research into the feasibility and acceptance of replacement solutions and into specific technological development.

Introduction strategy and its implementation

So far, little attention has been paid to the fact that self-driving vehicles are not entirely new territory for public transport. After all, the sector already has many years’ experience – with national and international driverless metro or rail projects, on which to build when introducing self-driving vehicles, such as the RUBIN project in Nuremberg and the Docklands Light Railway in London. However, the main stumbling block has not yet been overcome: how to combine different modes of transport (rail and road), and different types of service (fixed-route services versus on-demand services), as efficiently as possible.

Based on experience already made by operators, the introduction strategy of self-driving vehicles will be implemented in passenger service in stages with a gradual increase in complexity. It is assumed that rail bound public transport vehicles will be the first ones to be operated without drivers, followed by bus systems, which have a dedicated infrastructure (bus rapid transit systems), where they run on a separate route from other traffic, with clearly defined timetables. Fixed-route services would probably be the next transport type to become completely driverless, followed eventually by pure on-demand services.

This introduction strategy provides public transport operators a solid basis to expand their current core competence – the operation of shared transport – to include self-driving vehicles. Therefore, one of the next steps to be taken is to create an open and standardised reference architecture in conjunction with role models and cooperation scenarios.

Thanks to successful partnerships with public transport operators and our extensive portfolio of integrated IT systems for public transport, INIT is well placed to contribute to the introduction of driverless vehicles, both in the creation of the necessary framework architecture and in the development of new technological solutions.

Contact

Gunnar Rehbein

Manager Technology
init SE
Germany

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This article was published in our customer magazine INITiative, issue 1/2020. If you want to receive the magazine regularly per e-mail, we kindly ask you to subscribe.

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