Application of Design and Evaluation Tools to the Automated Highway System

An essential aspect of the Automated Highway System (AHS) program is to provide rigorous analytical and simulation tools to evaluate AHS concepts, then facilitate translating them into a prototype design. To address this challenge, the National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC) has adopted a multi-organizational and multi-disciplinary approach to identify, develop and tailor a suite of computational tools with sufficient modeling fidelity, credibility and clarity to meet the disparate needs of AHS designers, evaluators and stakeholders. Development of the AHS toolbox is tightly coupled to the needs of major concept development and evaluation activities. Tools will be provided to address separation policy implications on safety and throughput (e.g., inter-vehicle spacing under various ambient conditions); assess AHS technologies (e.g., robustness of control algorithms); simulate traffic control (e.g., dynamic traffic assignment to meet AHS exit requirements); determine emissions impact; address acceptability; and evaluate impacts to land use. Many of these tools will be supported by the SmartAHS simulator, in which roadway and vehicle behaviors can be simulated to user-defined fidelity to physically and graphically represent high resolution behaviors of in-vehicle components, the interaction between two vehicles or two platoons, all the way through large scale simulation of freeway networks. In this paper, the authors describe the AHS tool acquisition and development approach in the context of the design and evaluation needs for these tools, and the general types and intended functions of these tools. Example applications are highlighted.