As part of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's Transformational Technology Support contract, the Connected Transit Platooning Pilot Study was conducted to assess the feasibility of platooning transit vehicles through connected vehicle (CV) technologies to supplement existing transit services.
One of the tasks we led was to conduct a connected vehicle (CV) and automated vehicle (AV) roadway readiness analysis (RRA) and technology feasibility study for a variety of roadways in Western Pennsylvania including arterials, city roads, and interstate highways to connect populated towns to Pittsburgh. The use case is to deploy automated full-size buses, which travel together in a platoon with minimal headway separation, behaving as two parts of a single vehicle. The first stage would deploy automation consistent with Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Level 2, with a follower vehicle able to maintain a specific following distance behind a lead bus, and to steer automatically based on the direction of motion of the lead bus. The second stage would deploy buses with SAE Level 4 automation, which also include the SAE Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA) functionality, enabling the lead and follower buses to coordinate their movements without human operator intervention.
We are applying the RRA framework, processes and tools to assess the readiness of the roadways for deployment of this technology while remaining technology agnostic. The RRA also includes the AECOM-developed roadway complexity for automated vehicles (RCAV) analysis, which quantifies the level of difficulty of a roadway for today’s automated driving systems (ADS), which can highlight segments of a road that may provide barriers for deployment.
The RRA may also be used for identifying CV and AV applications, exploring data exchange and open data needs, and for communication with the public and other stakeholders as to the readiness of a roadway system to support CV and AV applications.
The key outcomes of the project have included:
- Data-driven analysis of roadway readiness for platooning automated transit buses
- Data integration from a variety of sources, including public and subscription-based data sources
- Specific recommendations to improve readiness based on current and projected technology capability maturity
- Information to complement other efforts to integrate connected and automated vehicle technologies and applications, such as strategic planning, program planning, and Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSMO).