Future cities and autonomous vehicles: analysis of the barriers to full adoption

The inevitable upcoming technology of autonomous vehicles (AVs) will affect our cities and several aspects of our lives. The widespread adoption of AVs repose at crossing distinct barriers that prevent their full adoption. This paper presents a critical review of recent debates about AVs and analyse the key barriers to their full adoption. This study has employed a mixed research methodology on a selected database of recently published research works. Thus, the outcomes of this review integrate the barriers into two main categories; (1) User/Government perspectives that include (i) Users' acceptance and behaviour, (ii) Safety, and (iii) Legislation. (2) Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) which include (i) Computer software and hardware, (ii) Communication systems V2X, and (iii) accurate positioning and mapping. Furthermore, a framework of barriers and their relations to AVs system architecture has been suggested to support future research and technology development

Data transmission plan adaptation complementing strategic time-network selection for connected vehicles

Connected vehicles can nowadays be equipped with multiple network interfaces to access the Internet via a number of networks. To achieve an efficient transmission within this environment, a strategic time-network selection for connected vehicles has been developed, which plans ahead delay-tolerant transmissions. Under perfect prediction (knowledge) of the environment, the proposed strategic time-network selection approach is shown to outperform significantly leading state-of-the-art approaches which are based either on time selection or network selection only. Under realistic environments, however, the efficiency of planning-based approaches may be severely compromised since network presence and available capacities change rapidly and in an unforeseen manner (because of changing conditions due to the uncertainty in car movement, data transmission needs and network characteristics). To address this problem, a mechanism is proposed in this paper that determines the deviation from the anticipated conditions and modifies the transmission plan accordingly. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptation mechanisms help maintain the benefits of a strategic time-network selection planning under changing conditions. © 2018 Elsevier B.V

A Concept for a C2X-based Crossroad Assistant

In urban crossroad areas the traffic flow is commonly not efficient. This results in an unnecessary high traffic density within cities and a resulting environmental pollution by the waste of fuel. To improve this situation, the driver should be enabled to better slow down, to better accelerate, to better decide, to better come in and to better follow within crossroads. This can be achieved by a C2X-based crossroads assistant that brings information about crossroads with lanes and traffic lights on time to the driver to decide on a convenient crossing strategy. Within this paper we introduce our concept for such a crossroads assistant that is based on newly standardized C2X message types. We have developed a novel graphical user interface for interpreting this new information sources in an intuitive, informative but not distractive way to the driver. A first prototype is already implemented and under test