Adriano Alessandrini

CityMobil2: Challenges and Opportunities of Fully Automated Mobility

The main benefits of road automation will be obtained when cars will drive themselves with or without passengers on-board and on any kind of roads, especially in urban areas. This will allow the creation of new transport services—forms of shared mobility, which will enable seamless mobility from door to door without the need of owning a vehicle. To enable this vision, vehicles will not just need to become “autonomous” when automated; they will need to become part of an Automated Road Transport System (ARTS). The CityMobil2 EC project mission is progressing toward this vision defining and demonstrating the legal and technical frameworks necessary to enable ARTS on the roads. After a thorough revision of the literature which allows us to state that automation will perform its best when it will be full-automation and vehicles will be allowed to circulate in urban environments, the paper identifies where these transport systems perform their best, with medium size vehicle as on-demand transport services feeding conventional mass transits in the suburbs of large cities, on radial corridors as complementary mass transits with large busses and platoons of them and as main public transport for small cities with personal vehicles; then defines the infrastructural requirements to insert safely automated vehicles and transport systems in urban areas. Finally it defines the vehicle technical requirements to do so.

Safe Integration of Fully Automated Road Transport Systems in Urban Environments: Basis for Missing Legal Framework

Automated road transport systems (ARTS) are based on the use of fully automated road vehicles controlled by a centralized system for fleet and infrastructure management. ARTS are aimed (at least at the beginning) at supplementing mass transit in the last mile and are commercially available today. However, their deployment is limited at the moment to protected or special roads. In urban areas, where these systems can be most beneficial, they cannot be implemented because of the absence of an adapted legal framework. The CityMobil2 project, financed by the European Commission, aims to remove the legal barriers that prevent the deployment of ARTS in urban areas by developing a specific legal framework. Previous experience based on risk assessment and failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis has demonstrated acceptability to national authorities. On this basis, the CityMobil2 project has started developing a methodology for the certification of full ARTS, aimed at guaranteeing an adequate level of safety. The certification framework has been developed at the theoretical level, but during the next phases of the CityMobil2 project, it will be tested in real-world conditions during the ARTS demonstrations that will be organized in several cities of Europe to make this methodology a major reference for a future legal framework.

Advanced transport systems showcased in La Rochelle

CityMobil project, a large integrated project co-funded by DG RESEARCH of the European Commission, organized in La Rochelle an advanced city car showcase in which it gave to the citizens the possibility to ride driverless vehicles. 256 users where interviewed. Responses where very positive with all indicators passing the threshold of positive acceptance; only the perception of safety was on the threshold but not above. Such positive response of the citizens to the new transport systems showcased in La Rochelle convinced the city to implement a larger demonstrator with fully automated vehicles. The demonstration supplies a shuttle service in a street with restricted traffic access and presence of pedestrians. It starts in May 2011 and lasts for three months until the end of July. This is the first ever demonstrator in which fully automated vehicles are legally authorized to run a passenger transport service in an unprotected environment.

The HOST vehicle concept: Human oriented sustainable transport

HOST is an innovative vehicle concept suitable for the urban transport of both persons and goods. To lower the impact of mobility on the cities, cleaner vehicles are not enough: an integrated passenger and freight strategy must be adopted. Cleaner vehicles must be specifically designed for the purpose to be better than conventional ones under any aspect, including costs. To lower such costs and to start up the Low Polluting Vehicles (LPV) market the versatility of LPVs has to be enhanced. HOST aims at developing a fully versatile low-cost LPV concept. Versatility is achieved by making HOST vehicle modular and cost reduction is obtained by using the same vehicle for different purposes, simply changing different cabins on the same chassis. The main four tasks HOST is conceived for are: • Nocturne collective taxi; • Daytime car sharing services; • Daytime freight collection and distribution; • Nocturne garbage collection. The four mentioned services are not the only ones HOST may be used for, but are those for which it is specifically studied. Such choice is made for one very simple reason: all of the four tasks belong to the same family of “municipal services”. Using the same chassis to operate all the different services is feasible and can finally create the critical mass of final users, so to reach convenient prices. The four services chosen, two addressing passenger mobility and two addressing freight mobility, go all in the way of reducing city mobility impact. Car sharing and nocturne collective taxi systems, if integrated with public transport, can increase its attractiveness, pushing more people to use it. Freight pick-up and delivery and garbage collection need a low polluting alternative to be re-organised, so to become sustainable. The powertrain layout and the possibility to easily vary the platform main dimensions enable HOST to be equipped with very different bodyworks, which let the car manufacturer provides both private and public bodies, such as municipalities or urban mobility authorities. More in detail the energy system is all included in the HOST platform and it is conceived in shaped boxes, so that its modules become inter-exchangeable. A series hybrid configuration let HOST to be equipped with an internal combustion engine (ICE) coupled with an energy recovery system (batteries+supercapacitors), anyhow is already designed to utilise fuel cells (FC) powered by pure hydrogen just changing the energy module (and the tank), being this last the final purpose of the concept design. Thanks to these two solutions HOST is able to run as a zero emission vehicle for a limited period (ICE) or for the whole driving cycle (FC). A full drive-by-wire solution is adopted and the only mechanical connections between the cabin and the platform will be a specifically designed mechanical anchorage, these solutions will allow the easy installation/removal of any cabin. The vehicle has four wheel drive capability (4WD), thus featuring a good grip even on slippery roads. The four electric motors (one per wheel) allow an easy traction control, ensuring stability and safety. The chassis has a four wheel total steering (4WS) configuration, that enables the vehicle to rotate around its vertical axis as well as the to shift horizontally. These characteristics give HOST decisive advantages for the missions it has been conceived for. The 4WS capability gives to the vehicle easy manoeuvring in little streets in the cities centres and they are useful for the accurate positioning to be easily accessible by wheel chairs, during freight loading/unloading operations and while it runs as a garbage truck. Only a modular vehicle featuring the reusing concept can cover contemporarily all the selected services: one vehicle chassis with different sizes interchangeable energy generation modules and different bodies, depending on the service it is used for. Such concept, other than abating the environmental impact, will allow: • a reduction of costs: one chassis can fit several bodies compensating the higher cost of a low environmental impact energy and traction system; • a reduction of occupied space: the vehicle is always in use, night and day; • a reduction of waste materials, increasing their lifetime; • an increased life of vehicles, due to the possibility of changing bodies and energy generation modules; • traffic congestion reduction: using and reusing one vehicle for several services.Copyright

The Socio-Economic Impact of Urban Road Automation Scenarios: CityMobil2 Participatory Appraisal Exercise

This document aims at assessing and fine tuning alternative scenarios concerning road automated transport, based on the contribution of research, industry and public stakeholders convened at the CityMobil2 Workshops organised in La Rochelle on 30–31st March 2015. Two different paradigms—with and without a shift to shared mobility—were debated and a number of potential socio-economic impacts were identified. Road automation scenarios are devised for different urban typologies—large metropolitan areas, polycentric city networks, small-medium towns, rural/tourist areas. Impacts are assessed in a qualitative fashion—with the support of an online DELPHI survey followed by the workshop debates—in relation to a number of variables. These include: job disruption and creation; personal trips costs; public budget effects; insurance costs; accessibility to remote areas; road capacity and its use; journey comfort and convenience; energy and emissions; land saving for new public space uses; social impacts in terms of safety, personal security, health and active travel (trade-offs in automated rides vs. walking or cycling) and different perception/value of time spent travelling in automated vehicles.

Automated Road Transport Systems (ARTS)—The Safe Way to Integrate Automated Road Transport in Urban Areas

The CityMoibil2 project aims at developing and demonstrating Automated Road Transport Systems, ARTS. The philosophy of the project is that the vehicle cannot be automated autonomously; it requires infrastructures and external control systems to be in the picture too. The certification methodology developed by the project (derived from the rail technical standard EN 50126) is demonstrated to guarantee the safe insertion of automated road vehicles in the urban environment; however it requires some adaptation of the environment. It is based on a risk assessment procedure organized in 8 steps. Its application to one section of the Oristano demonstrator is used as example.

ParkShuttle II : Review of the Antibes Experiment

In many urban environments, the use of private automobile has led to severe problems with respect to congestion, energy (dependency on oil resources), pollution, noise, safety and general degradation of the quality of life. Therefore, city centers are facing severe problems, traditional commerce in them declines, moving to the periphery, and they become less attractive to visitors and businesses. Although public transport systems have seen many recent improvements mostly due to information technologies), in many cases the private car still offers a much better service at the individual level. This leads to a constant increase in its use, hence to non-sustainable development of urban transport. An innovative approach for mobility, emerging now as an alternative generic solution to the private passenger car, offers the same flexibility and much less nuisances: small automated vehicles that form part of the public transport system and complement mass transit and non-motorized transport, providing passenger service for any location at any time. These vehicles were developed during the 1990’s are now called cybercars and, under the control of a management centre, they form a transportation system called Cybernetic Transport System or CTS. The first CTS was put in operation at Schiphol airport (Amsterdam) in December 1997. In 2001, the European Commission funded two projects. One, called CyberCar, was aimed at the improvement of the technology necessary to implement and run such a CTS and was funded under the transport and tourism key action of DG INFSO research program. The second, CyberMove, was aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of CTS in present urban environments and was funded under the City of Tomorrow key action of DG TREN research program. Both programs ended in 2004.

Ex-ante evaluation of nine cybernetic transport systems

This work presents the results of the ex-ante evaluation of CyberMove project. CyberMove is an R&D project carried on by a consortium of 17 partners from Europe, Switzerland and Israel and co-funded by the European commission. The main goal of CyberMove is to demonstrate the effectiveness of cybernetic transport systems (CTSs) in solving city mobility problems, proving that they have now reached high levels of reliability, safety and user friendliness. CyberMove evaluation is organized in three phases: initial, ex-ante and ex-post. This paper deals with the results of the ex-ante evaluation phase. It reports the first assessment results of the designed CTSs. The main findings of the sites taking part to CyberMove evaluations are the following: (1) users (both actual and potential) like CTSs. They are easy but their performances are perceived to be low. (2) CTS performances are extremely good. Wherever CTSs are compared to conventional public transport systems they always provide better travel and waiting times and therefore attract more users. (3) Although CTSs are better than conventional PT systems, private cars are still more attractive and an integrated transport policy has been adopted to make CTSs profitable.