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Content archived on 2024-04-19

Test on Cooperative driving

Objective

"To make a field test in a protected environment of some cooperative driving facilities in order to evaluate, assess and validate the system". Main attention will be paid to the Motorway environment with Intelligent Cruise Control (ICC) and Intelligent Manoeuvre Control (IMC).

Technical approach

The cooperative driving functions already identified within PROMETHEUS and DRIVE will be evaluated through a set of field trials and analysis.

As far as the level of "cooperation" for ICC function is concerned, both "Autonomous" and "Cooperative" will be tested and analysed.

For the envisaged cooperative driving system, the following activity will be performed:

Qualification of the system, to ensure its proper cooperation.
A large scale endurance test
The analysis and extrapolation of the trial results to the European motorway network.

From such an analysis conclusions, suggestions and proposed recommendations will be derived regarding the implementation and the introduction of cooperative driving functions in the future.

Moreover the project will be in strict contact with the MMI and traffic safety horizontal group envisaged within DRIVE 2 in order to properly face and set the Man Machine Interaction and traffic safety issues. The same will be for the System Safety group in order to have a qualification of the systems in agreement with the outcome of such a group.

The protected environment in which the test will be carried out is a trial track suitable for a good reproduction of motorway traffic.

The qualification is carried out to ensure the proper operation of the studied systems. It will be carried out through:

microsimulation
limited field trials involving few cars (5-6) in a highly controlled environment

The scenarios of these field trials will be defined in order to test a comprehensive set of manoeuvres which are relevant for motorway traffic. The Scenarios will also be simulated with a microsimulation tool available within the project in order to identify the problems that could arise and to be aware of expected results.

The synthesis of simulation and field trial results will enable the qualification of the system for the following endurance tests.

During the endurance test, some vehicles (8-10) will be equipped with a cooperative driving system. Various types of cars might be used during these tests.

The dimension of test, that can be considered a true pilot project is about 4 months of runs with 8 vehicles travelling for 6 hours per day, this means 200,000 - 250,000 Km travelled.

To make the test more efficient, it is also envisaged to modify the traffic flow by giving driving recommendation the test drivers. Some traffic conditions that do not occur often on the track but that do occur on the motorways could thus be artificially created. In that way, the cooperative driving devices might be used more intensively in more severe and more representative conditions.

The drivers will be hired by the Project, and trained to the cooperative driving aids using a driving simulator before entering the track with the new devices.

Data about the equipped vehicles driving on the motorway-like track will be gathered both on board and in the central computer of Track operators through the existing local data collection system. In addition, interviews of the test pilots will be organised to evaluate the degree of acceptance of system, even if the population of professional drivers (not test drivers) is biased. Moreover some results on man machine interaction aspects are expected.

Starting from the work already performed in DRIVE, the European motorway network will be identified and a set of significant motorway stretches will be selected.

Starting from the analysis of the endurance test data, the impact of cooperative driving functions on these motorway samples will be evaluated, mainly using macrosimulation.

The impact on the overall European network will then be derived.

Expected Achievements

The first step before the operational test will be the CED 4 EICC (Extended Intelligence Cruise Control) demonstration that will take place the 1 February in the TESCO test site and that will be organised within the close collaboration between TESCO consortium and the CED 4 of PROMETHEUS.

The main expectation is to have notices on the feasibility of the devices already developed in laboratory and to think on possible improvement to get better the robustness of the whole system in order to arrive to the operational test with sufficient reliable devices.

In the second year remarkable attention will be paid on the development of the recording data system that will have to be able to record only the relevant data omitting the insignificant ones.

In close connection with the recording system there is the evaluation system; it will be able to assess not only the data coming from the mechanical and electronic devices, but also the behaviour of the drivers and of the traffic measurements.

In addition an assessment on the strategy used on the advisory system based on the calculation of the level of risk in which a driver is running, is in expectation already from the operational test. This will allow to change the algorithm to compute such "risk Level" or the implemented strategy if it is necessary.

Expected Impact

The impact of such a project can be split in two different items.

The first is concerning the direct results that the project can give on which Cooperative Driving Functions that don't need special legislation or standardisation issues, this is the case, for example of AICC, for which after the "endurance test", the Actors involved in the project could deliver on a market basis an AICC product.

The second is concerning those Cooperative Driving Function that require, other than further effort on technical matter, also a strong effort, before the implementation, on standards and recommendation. At the end of this Project field test on public environment have be performed and, in parallel, work on innovative regulation have to be carried out.

Contribution to standardisation

TESCO aims to contribute to the standardisation process as far as Cooperative Driving technologies is concerned.

On the basis of the qualification tests, endurance tests, and European level impact assessment, suggestions and recommendation will be drawn about the implementation and introduction of cooperative driving systems in the future.

These activities will be planned in conjunction with PROMETHEUS and with the Swedish project DALTM and in order to cover as much as possible the Cooperative Driving domain.

Topic(s)

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Call for proposal

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Funding Scheme

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Coordinator

Centro Studi sui Sistemi di Trasporto SpA (CSST)
EU contribution
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Address
Via G Giolitti 48
10123 Torino
Italy

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Participants (6)