Towards safety of transportation systems with a mixture of automated and human-driven vehicles

The fraction of automated vehicles is negligibly small in current ground traffic. Anticipating the development of intelligent vehicle technologies, this fraction is estimated to increase in the coming decades, culminating, if ever, in a fully automated transportation system. Motivated by this we investigate the problem of provable safety for mixed transportation systems featuring both automated vehicles (AVs) as well as human-driven vehicles (HVs). The contribution of our work in [1], briefly summarized here, is in showing how to integrate the two different types of vehicle models safely into a mixed system. We take into account the differences in the capabilities between AVs and HVs in five aspects and design motion planning policies and coordination rules that result in a provably safe system. We also allow AVs to engage in platooning to increase traffic throughput. We prove system-wide safety of the proposed design.

I. Problem Description and Modeling

In order to move from the current human-driven transportation system to a future system with automated vehicles, one will have to address the problem of transition, where there is a mixture of human-driven (HV) and automated vehicles (AV). A mixed transportation system can be comprised of arbitrary proportions of AVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs), with the AVs pursuing strategies such as platooning. One major challenge in safely integrating them is that they have different capabilities for situational awareness and decision-making, but should smoothly coexist.