As a two-sided digital platform, ride-sourcing has disruptively penetrated the mobility market. Ride-sourcing companies provide door-to-door transport services by connecting passengers with independent service suppliers labelled as “driver-partners”. Once a passenger submits a ride request, the platform attempts to match the request with a nearby available driver. Drivers have the freedom to accept or decline ride requests. The consequences of this decision, which is made at the operation level, have remained largely unknown in the literature. Using agent-based simulation modelling on the realistic case study of the city of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, we study the impacts of drivers’ ride acceptance behaviour, estimated from unique empirical data, on the ride-sourcing system where the platform applies regular and surge pricing strategies, and riders may revoke their requests and reject the received offers. Furthermore, we delve into the implications of various supply–demand intensities, a centralised fleet (i.e., mandatory acceptance on each ride request) versus a decentralised fleet (i.e., ride acceptance decision by each driver), ride acceptance rates, and surge pricing settings. We find that the ride acceptance decision of ride-sourcing drivers has far-reaching consequences for system performance in terms of passengers’ waiting time, driver's revenue, operating costs, and profit, all of which are highly dependent on the ratio between demand and supply. As the system undergoes a transition from undersupplied (i.e., real-time demand locally exceeds available drivers) to balanced and then oversupplied state (i.e., more available drivers than real-time demand), ride acceptance decisions result in higher income inequality. A high acceptance rate among drivers may lead to more rides, but it does not necessarily increase their profit. Surge pricing is found to be asymmetrically in favour of all the parties despite adverse effects on the demand side due to higher trip fare. This study offers insights into both the aggregated and disaggregated levels of ride-sourcing system operations and outlines a series of transport policy and practice implications in cities that offer such ride-sourcing systems.

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This paper addresses the challenges of charging infrastructure design (CID) for electrified public transport networks using Battery Electric Buses (BEBs) under conditions of sparse energy consumption data. Accurate energy consumption estimation is critical for cost-effective and reliable electrification but often requires costly field experiments, resulting in limited data. To address this issue, we propose two mathematical models designed to handle uncertainty and data sparsity in energy consumption. The first is a robust optimization model with box uncertainty, addressing variability in energy consumption. The second is a data-driven distributionally robust optimization model that leverages observed data to provide more flexible and informed solutions. To evaluate these models, we apply them to the Rotterdam bus network. Our analysis reveals three key insights: (1) Ignoring variations in energy consumption can result in operational unreliability, with up to 55% of scenarios leading to infeasible trips. (2) Designing infrastructure based on worst-case energy consumption increases costs by 67% compared to using average estimates. (3) The data-driven distributionally robust optimization model reduces costs by 28% compared to the box uncertainty model while maintaining reliability, especially in scenarios where extreme energy consumption values are rare and data exhibit skewness. In addition to cost savings, this approach provides robust protection against uncertainty, ensuring reliable operation under diverse conditions.

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Automated driving developments should be considered when making decisions about investments in physical and digital infrastructure. This paper proposes four scenarios for automated driving developments in the Netherlands in 2040 and 2060 taking into account uncertainties regarding future penetration rates, the level of connectivity, the operational design domain, and the expected impacts of automated driving: 1) Late transition, 2) Automated vehicles on main roads, 3) Car-topia, and 4) Share-topia. To derive these scenarios, an extended switchboard method is introduced in which multiple driving forces for automated driving can be varied. The main driving forces were identified based on expert surveys. For each scenario, a modelling approach is used to compute the impact of automated driving on vehicle kilometres driven and congestion. The extended switchboard method offered more flexibility than existing scenario methods. The model-based impact assessment provided more conservative and probably more accurate insights into the expected impacts of automated driving on vehicle kilometres driven and congestion than expert estimates from the literature. The results show that in all scenarios automation leads to an increase in the number of trips, vehicle kilometres driven and congestion. In the scenarios with autonomous vehicles, congestion is expected to increase up to 17%. The higher the penetration rates of connected automated vehicles, the smaller the increase in congestion (1.5%-11%). The results indicate that investments in digital infrastructure are needed to prevent capacity reduction due to autonomous driving. The scenarios “car-topia” and “share-topia” may require additional physical infrastructure on motorways and regional roads, and/or the implementation of demand management strategies.

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Electric mobility hubs (eHUBS) are locations where multiple shared electric modes including electric cars and e-bikes are available. To assess their potential to reduce private car use, it is important to investigate to what extent people would switch to eHUBS modes after their introduction. Moreover, people may adapt their behaviour differently depending on their current travel mode. This study is based on stated preference data collected in Amsterdam. We analysed the data using mixed logit models. We found that users of different modes not only have varied general preferences for different shared modes but also have different sensitivity for attributes such as travel time and cost. Public transport users are more likely to switch to eHUBS modes than car users. People who bike and walk have strong inertia, but the percentage choosing eHUBS modes doubles when the trip distance is longer (5 or 10 km).

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Drivers initiate a discretionary lane change when they perceive an anticipated improvement in their own driving condition from moving to another lane. However, such a lane change can slow down other vehicles on the target lane, and even worse initiate a disturbance. In this work, we argue that the blocking effect triggered by individual lane changes results from the heterogeneity in the desired speeds of vehicles, and thus using desired speed information of vehicles when regulating lane-changing decisions can improve traffic efficiency. In doing so, our work also exemplifies the usefulness of incorporating user preferences into control decisions. The proposed lane guidance system uses an optimization-based approach to update the target range of desired speeds on each lane in real time, and accordingly recommends individual lane changes. The control system coordinates the lane-changing decisions at the link level, for which the road stretch is subdivided into multiple sections that are controlled independently. We evaluate the performance of the lane guidance system in micro-simulation, for different network demands and desired speed distributions. The results highlight that the proposed approach utilizing the desired speed preferences of drivers results in positive efficiency gains for most traffic compositions in free flow. Moreover, the highest gains are expected in medium to high demand, and when the traffic composition includes a higher proportion of vehicles desiring higher speeds. The gains also increase when the desired speeds of vehicles that want to drive fast and those that want to drive slower are more separated.

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Increasing attention is being paid to intersection signal control with cooperative platoons. Assuming platoons being formed, such platoons cannot only improve the intersection capacity but also minimize the number of control units, especially when dedicated connected and automated vehicle (CAV) lanes are considered. However, the platoon formation process is often neglected, especially for lane-changing and overtaking maneuvers in mixed traffic. This may jeopardize the potential of signal control with platoons. This article proposes a platoon formation algorithm that computes the optimal lane, platoon sequence, and speed profiles of CAVs under the requirement of the central traffic controller. The algorithm is designed for mixed traffic conditions and hence the performance of human-driven vehicles is also considered. A mixed integer linear program model is formulated to minimize the deviation from the desired platoon configuration and the disturbance to overall traffic under any arbitrary initial condition. Numerical experiments are designed to test the effectiveness and the computational performance of the proposed algorithm. Results show that CAVs with signal control can form platoons with rational motion. Besides, the platoon penetration significantly affects platooning feasibility, while the platoon length does not. This suggests that CAVs can form long platoons at intersections to improve traffic throughput.

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Automated Driving Systems (ADS) are aimed to improve traffic efficiency and safety, however these systems are not yet capable of handling all driving tasks in all types of road conditions. The role of a human driver remains crucial in taking over control, if an ADS fails or reaches its operational limits. Takeover performance of human drivers in authority transitions is typically assessed by means of the takeover time (TOT) taken within an available time budget (TB). This approach assumes a uniform perception and reaction time of human drivers in ADS disengagements, and does not include the time needed to execute the actual driving maneuver required to ensure safety. This paper aims to develop and test a set of new indicators to reflect takeover performance and its safety attributes, namely the ‘time to control’ (TC) and the ‘safe time budget’ (STB), in which the actual task execution (i.e. braking) time is taken into account, in addition to the perception and reaction time. It also proposes new thresholds for identifying critical conflicts in takeover situations and assessing the safety of authority transitions. A traffic simulation experimental setup is used with mixed traffic of conventional vehicles and ACC/CACC platoons in order to test these indicators and thresholds. The results suggest that the time difference between TC and STB is a more sensitive and potentially more realistic safety indicator, as it may capture the variability of driver behavior in takeovers and identify critical conflicts, as well as virtual crashes, that would not have been identified by the previously used indicators (TOT and TB). Takeover performance worsens when the speed difference of the vehicles involved is higher, and the initial speed of the rear vehicle is higher. These findings can be useful towards a more dynamic design of takeover request strategies.

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This study utilized Virtual Reality (VR) experiments to investigate pedestrian-autonomous vehicle interaction in shared spaces. In the VR experiment, pedestrians attempt to cross the road under different conditions, including the presence of another pedestrian, different external Human-Machine-Interfaces, AV driving styles, and road conditions. We employed an innovative VR setup that enabled two pedestrians to interact in real time with physical movements within an immersive VR environment. Overall, we found that the presence of multiple pedestrians significantly influenced pedestrian movement dynamics during road crossing. Additionally, the relative standing position had a significant impact on the distant pedestrians regarding time before crossing and vehicle-gazing behavior. While previous studies predominantly focused on pedestrian-AV interaction with a single pedestrian, this study takes an important step forward in terms of theory, methods, and relevance by considering interactions between multiple pedestrians and AVs. The findings establish a basis for further exploration of pedestrian-AV interaction in shared space.

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In the present study, we explored the influence of ride experience in automated minibuses (AmBs) on transport mode choice that includes the automated shuttles as well as conventional transport options (car, bus and bicycle) on the first-/ last-mile stage of rail trips. We used the case study of the connection between Brandevoort train station and the newly developing working and living area in Helmond (the Netherlands) where an AmB was tested in the February-March period of 2021. We conducted a two-wave stated preference experiment wherein data was gathered both before and after the participants had a test ride in the AmB. The results of the joint hybrid mixed logit model indicate a clear preference towards flexible-service AmBs, particularly in relation to travel time and costs. While preferences for less favoured regular-service AmBs experienced a noteworthy shift in travel time and costs, waiting and walking time parameters influenced by participants' ride experience in this pilot and by prior ride experience from other pilots. This reinforces the idea that the ride experience in AmBs even in a short pilot trial like the one conducted in Helmond has a significant impact on preferences for AmBs in comparison with car, bus and bicycle alternatives. Hence, panel studies can provide a more comprehensive understanding of how attitudes and preferences of potential users evolve over time.

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Automated vehicles (AVs) may require the implementation of an external human-machine interface (eHMI) to communicate their intentions to human-driven vehicles. The optimal placement of the eHMI, either on the AV itself or as part of the road infrastructure, remains undetermined. The current driving simulator study investigated the effect of eHMI positioning on human driving behaviour, during the approach and execution of right turns at T-intersections. Forty-three participants drove under three conditions: absence of eHMI, eHMI on the AV (eHMIv), and eHMI integrated into the infrastructure (eHMIi). Participants encountered AVs that either yielded or did not yield to their vehicles. The results regarding the placement of the eHMI showed that both concepts are advantageous, but for different reasons. eHMIv was appreciated because implicit and explicit communication are congruent, although the AV must first be visually identified to respond to it. eHMIi was appreciated because a familiar cue is always at a known location in the environment; as a result, participants braked earlier for the intersection and came less close to the AV (which can be interpreted as a safety advantage or an efficiency disadvantage). Although there are limitations to the current driving simulator study, this research provides important insights into the fundamental question of how information placement affects drivers’ visual attention demands and driving behaviour, topics that are important in view of the development of future cities.

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Once trusted, automated vehicles (AVs) will gradually appear in urban areas. Such a transition is an opportunity in transport planning to control undesired impacts and possibly mitigate congestion at a time when both conventional vehicles (CVs) and AVs coexist. This paper deals with the complex transport decision problem of designing part of the network that is exclusive for AVs through a nonlinear programming model. The objective function minimises the costs of travel times where vehicles circulate under user equilibrium. The model evaluates the benefits of having an AVs-dedicated infrastructure and the associated costs from the detouring of CVs. Three planning strategies are explored: incremental, long-term and hybrid planning. The first creates a subnetwork evolving incrementally over time. The second reversely designs a subnetwork from the optimal solution obtained at a ratio of 90% AVs. The third limits the incremental planning towards that optimal long-term solution. The model is applied to the city of Delft, in the Netherlands. Two scenarios are analysed, with and without AV-dedicated roads, at several AV penetration rates. We find that implementing dedicated roads for AVs reduces the overall costs and congestion up to 16%. However, CV detouring is inevitable at later network stages, increasing the total distance travelled (up to 8%) and congestion in the surroundings of AV subnetworks. Concerning the planning strategies, incremental planning is appropriate for starting in the initial stages and is the strategy that most tackles CV detouring. The hybrid or the long-term strategies are more suitable to be applied after a ratio of 50% AVs, and the hybrid planning is the strategy that most reduces delay. @en

The use of partially automated driving systems raises concerns about potential responsibility issues, posing risk to the system safety, acceptance, and adoption of these technologies. The concept of meaningful human control has emerged in response to the responsibility gap problem, requiring the fulfillment of two conditions, tracking and tracing. While this concept has provided important philosophical and design insights on automated driving systems, there is currently little knowledge on how meaningful human control relates to subjective experiences of actual users of these systems. To address this gap, our study aimed to investigate the alignment between the degree of meaningful human control and drivers' perceptions of safety and trust in a real-world partially automated driving system. We utilized previously collected data from interviews with Tesla "Full Self-Driving"(FSD) Beta users, investigating the alignment between the user perception and how well the system was tracking the users' reasons. We found that tracking of users' reasons for driving tasks (such as safe maneuvers) correlated with perceived safety and trust, albeit with notable exceptions. Surprisingly, failure to track lane changing and braking reasons was not necessarily associated with negative perceptions of safety. However, the failure of the system to track expected maneuvers in dangerous situations always resulted in low trust and perceived lack of safety. Overall, our analyses highlight alignment points but also possible discrepancies between perceived safety and trust on the one hand, and meaningful human control on the other hand. Our results can help the developers of automated driving technology to design systems under meaningful human control and are perceived as safe and trustworthy.

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The burgeoning navigation services using digital maps provide great convenience to drivers. However, there are sometimes anomalies in the lane rendering map images, which might mislead human drivers and result in unsafe driving. To accurately and effectively detect the anomalies, this paper transforms lane rendering image anomaly detection into a classification problem and proposes a four-phase pipeline consisting of data pre-processing, self-supervised pre-training with the masked image modeling (MiM) method, customized fine-tuning using cross-entropy loss with label smoothing, and post-processing to tackle it using state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, especially the Transformer models. Various experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed pipeline. The proposed pipeline can deliver superior lane rendering image anomaly detection performance, and especially, the self-supervised pre-training with MiM can greatly improve the detection accuracy while significantly reducing the total training time, e.g, Swin Transformer with Uniform Masking as self-supervised pretraining (Swin-Trans-UM) obtained better accuracy at 94.77% and better Area Under The Curve (AUC) at 0.9743 compared with the pure Swin Transformer without pre-training (Swin-Trans) whose accuracy is 94.01% AUC is 0.9498, and the fine-tuning epochs reduced to 41 from original 280. Ablation study further regarding techniques to alleviate the data imbalance between normal and abnormal instances further enhances the model performance. @en

Dedicated Lanes (DLs) have been proposed as a potential alternative for the deployment of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) to facilitate platooning and increase motorway capacity. However, the impact of the presence and utilization policy of such a lane on drivers’ preference to use automation and their behaviour has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this study, a driving simulator experiment is conducted, where participants drive a CAV in the presence of a DL with different utilization policies. Drivers have the possibility to choose between driving in an automated mode or in a manual mode. In automated mode they could adjust the driving speed and time headway and initiate automated lane changes. Two utilization policies were examined: mandatory versus optional use of DLs when driving in an automated mode. The impact of the presence and utilization policy of the DL on drivers’ preference to use automation and their behaviour in car-following and lane changing are investigated. The study found that while the presence of a DL does not increase drivers’ preference for automation use, it encourages drivers to utilize the DL more when the utilization policy is mandatory (i.e., drivers can only use automation mode when driving on this lane). Furthermore, drivers are more conservative in automated mode and when driving in mixed traffic. However, they perform closer car-following and merge into smaller gaps when driving on DLs which on one hand can increase the capacity of the DLs, but on the other hand can increase the risk of collisions. These results are useful for road operators, and in setting-up a more realistically traffic simulation studies.

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A substantial number of vehicles nowadays are equipped with adaptive cruise control (ACC), which adjusts the vehicle speed automatically. However, experiments have found that commercial ACC systems which only detect the direct leader amplify the propagating disturbances in the platoon. This can cause severe traffic congestion when the number of ACC-equipped vehicles increases. Therefore, an ACC system which also considers the second leader further downstream is required. Such a system enables the vehicle to achieve multi-anticipation and hence ensure better platoon stability. Nevertheless, measurements collected from the second leader may be comparatively inaccurate given the limitations of current state-of-the-art sensor technology. This study adopts deep reinforcement learning to develop ACC controllers that besides the input from the first leader exploits the additional information obtained from the second leader, albeit noisy. The simulation experiment demonstrates that even under the influence of noisy measurements, the multi-leader ACC platoon shows smaller disturbance and jerk amplitudes than the one-leader ACC platoon, indicating improved string stability and ride comfort. Practical takeaways are twofold: first, the proposed method can be used to further develop multi-leader ACC systems. Second, even noisy data from the second leader can help stabilize traffic, which makes such systems viable in practice.

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When making trips in urban environments, cyclists lose time as they stop and idle at signalized intersections. The main objective of this study was to show how augmenting the situational awareness of traffic signal controllers, using observations from moving sensor platforms, can enable prioritization of cyclists and reduce lost time within the control cycle in an effective way. We investigated the potential of using observations from connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as a source of new information, using a revised vehicle-actuated controller. This controller exploits CAV-generated observations of cyclists to optimize the control for cyclists. The results from a simulation study indicated that with a low CAV penetration rate, prioritizing cyclists by tracking reduced cyclist delays and stops, even with a small field of view. As the delay of car directions were not taken into account in this study, the average car delay increased considerably with an increasing number of cyclists. Future work is needed to optimize the control that balances the delays and stops of cyclists and cars.

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This study utilized Virtual Reality (VR) experiments to investigate pedestrian-autonomous vehicle interaction in shared spaces. In the VR experiment, pedestrians attempt to cross the road under different conditions, including the presence of another pedestrian, different external Human-Machin-Interfaces, AV driving styles, and road conditions. We employed an innovative VR setup that enabled two pedestrians to interact in real time with physical movements within an immersive VR environment. Overall, we found that the presence of multiple pedestrians significantly influenced pedestrian movement dynamics during road crossing. Additionally, the relative standing position had a significant impact on the distant pedestrians regarding time before crossing and vehicle-gazing behavior. While previous studies predominantly focused on pedestrian-AV interaction with a single pedestrian, this study takes an important step forward in terms of theory, methods, and relevance by considering interactions between multiple pedestrians and AVs. The findings establish a basis for further exploration of pedestrian-AV interaction in shared space.@en

Traffic scenarios in roundabouts pose substantial complexity for automated driving. Manually mapping all possible scenarios into a state space is labor-intensive and challenging. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with its ability to learn from interacting with the environment emerges as a promising solution for training such automated driving models. This study explores, employs, and implements various DRL algorithms, namely Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) to instruct automated vehicles' driving through roundabouts. The driving state space, action space, and reward function are designed. The reward function considers safety, efficiency, comfort, and energy consumption to align with real-world requirements. All three tested DRL algorithms succeed in enabling automated vehicles to drive through the roundabout. To holistically evaluate the performance of these algorithms, this study establishes an evaluation methodology considering multiple indicators, i.e., safety, efficiency, comfort and energy consumption level. A method employing the Analytic Hierarchy Process is also developed to weigh these evaluation indicators. Experimental results on various testing scenarios reveal that the TRPO algorithm outperforms DDPG and PPO in terms of safety and efficiency, while PPO performs the best in terms of comfort level and energy consumption. Lastly, to verify the model's adaptability and robustness regarding other driving scenarios, this study also deploys the model trained by TRPO to a range of different testing scenarios, e.g., highway driving and merging. Experimental results demonstrate that the TRPO model trained on only roundabout driving scenarios exhibits a certain degree of proficiency in highway driving and merging scenarios. This study provides a foundation for the application of automated driving with DRL.@en

The burgeoning navigation services using digital maps provide great convenience to drivers. Nevertheless, the presence of anomalies in lane rendering map images occasionally introduces potential hazards, as such anomalies can be misleading to human drivers and consequently contribute to unsafe driving conditions. In response to this concern and to accurately and effectively detect the anomalies, this paper transforms lane rendering image anomaly detection into a classification problem and proposes a four-phase pipeline consisting of data pre-processing, self-supervised pre-training with the masked image modeling (MiM) method, customized fine-tuning using cross-entropy based loss with label smoothing, and post-processing to tackle it leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, especially those involving Transformer models. Various experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed pipeline. Results indicate that the proposed pipeline exhibits superior performance in lane rendering image anomaly detection, and notably, the self-supervised pre-training with MiM can greatly enhance the detection accuracy while significantly reducing the total training time. For instance, employing the Swin Transformer with Uniform Masking as self-supervised pretraining (Swin-Trans-UM) yielded a heightened accuracy at 94.77% and an improved Area Under The Curve (AUC) score of 0.9743 compared with the pure Swin Transformer without pre-training (Swin-Trans) with an accuracy of 94.01% and an AUC of 0.9498. The fine-tuning epochs were dramatically reduced to 41 from the original 280. In conclusion, the proposed pipeline, with its incorporation of self-supervised pre-training using MiM and other advanced deep learning techniques, emerges as a robust solution for enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of lane rendering image anomaly detection in digital navigation systems.@en

The gradual deployment of automated vehicles (AVs) results in mixed traffic where AVs will interact with human-driven vehicles (HDVs). Thus, social-aware motion planning and control while considering interactions with HDVs on the road is critical for AVs' deployment and safe driving under various maneuvers. Previous research mostly focuses on the trajectory planning of AVs using Model Predictive Control or other relevant methods, while seldom considering the integrated planning and control of AVs altogether to simplify the whole pipeline architecture. Furthermore, there are very limited studies on social-aware driving that makes AVs understandable and expected by human drivers, and none when it comes to the challenging maneuver of driving through roundabouts. To fill these research gaps, this paper develops an integrated social-aware planning and control algorithm for AVs' driving through roundabouts based on Driving Risk Field (DRF), Social Value Orientation (SVO), and Model Predictive Contouring Control (MPCC), i.e., DRF-SVO-MPCC. The proposed method is tested and verified with simulation on the open-sourced highway-env platform. Compared with the baseline method using purely Nonlinear Model Predictive Control, the DRF-SVO-MPCC can achieve better performance under various maneuvers of driving through roundabouts with and without surrounding HDVs.@en