Latest updates (03/12) on preparing for AVS18

Post date: Mar 22, 2018 3:46:34 PM

Dear Members and Friends of the TRB Committee on Vehicle-Highway Automation:

We are making rapid progress on preparing the technical program for this summer’s Automated Vehicles Symposium (AVS18), which will be from July 9-12 in San Francisco, with ancillary meetings on the preceding and following days. Information about the latest developments will be continually updated on the AVS website: www.automatedvehiclessympoisum.org

Several important things to be aware of:

(1) The call for posters is active, and poster proposals are due March 22. This is a good way to expose your most recent work to the audience of people who are most interested in the future of road vehicle automation. Don’t wait until the last minute to submit your poster proposal at: http://www.automatedvehiclessymposium.org/program/call-for-posters

(2) The early-bird registration discount period is being extended to March 30, although that does not show up yet on the website. Save $80 off the full conference registration fee by registering before March 30. Go to:

http://www.automatedvehiclessymposium.org/Shladover

(note I don’t get any commission on this, but it helps the registration people know how people got directed to the registration website).

(3) At last count, we have 36 breakout sessions under development for the afternoons of July 9, 10 and 11. The allocations by day and meeting room are being worked out now and should be available within the next week or so. With three afternoons of breakout sessions, we have been able to add a bunch of timely new topics for the breakout discussions. Descriptions of the topics of the breakouts should be posted on the website soon.

(4) The group organizing one of the breakout sessions, from ASCE, has asked us to circulate this open call for presentations:

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV) Impacts Committee would like to announce the Call for Abstracts for a breakout session at the Automated Vehicles Symposium (AVS) 2018 to be held from July 9-12, 2018 in San Francisco, CA.

With the recent attention from policy-makers on fixing crumbling transportation infrastructure, and the associated increases in funding availability, roadway owner/operators are considering the changes that need to be made to the planning, design, operation, and maintenance of all roads and modes to support automated vehicles. The emergence of vehicle automation offers the opportunity for roadway owner/operators to safely manage traffic flow in ways that have never before been possible; for example, commanding the speed for platoons of automated cars to maximize throughout on existing freeway lanes, moving platoons of automated trucks on dedicated lanes near ports and warehouse complexes, or creating rubber-tired “light rail” systems by combining strings of automated buses traveling on existing right-of-way. This requires us not only understanding dynamics of individual automated vehicles but also investigating characteristics of a transportation system containing a large number of automated vehicles. Emergent behaviors and group phenomena rather than a simple collection of individual properties may rise as a major challenge to management of such transportation systems.

To address this challenge, this breakout session will explore some of these ideas and more that are being considered as we transform today’s roadway infrastructure into the smart transportation system of the future. It focuses on how to scale up the benefits from individual connected and automated vehicles to a system level, from a corridor network, urban grid streets, up to a regional network. The CAV technologies also facilitate realization of other emerging transportation concepts (e.g., analytics of emerging transportation data, shared mobility). Those CAV-enabled techniques and their impacts brought to the transportation systems will also be discussed in this session.

This breakout session features keynote speakers, session presentations (15-20min each including Q&As), panel discussions, and research needs statements. What to submit: a presentation title; contact and a brief bio of the corresponding author; contact of all co-authors and an abstract that summarizes problem statement, findings and significance, not to exceed 500 words. All in one single word document. The submission deadline is Saturday, March 31, 2018. More details about the CFA can be found in the attachment.

(5) Another upcoming meeting with an open call that may be of interest to committee members and friends is the following one for a workshop on ensuring and validating safety of automated vehicles, for the IEEE ITS Conference in Maui, Hawaii in November. This call is described below and in the second attachment file to this message:

We kindly invite you to contribute to the workshop on ''Ensuring and Validating Safety for Automated Vehicles'' which we have proposed for the Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference 2018 (ITSC, November 4-7, 2018, Maui, Hawaii, USA).

The development of automated driving has made huge advances in the last years. Several companies have announced the deployment of automated vehicles (SAE level 3+) into public traffic in the near future. However, safety aspects – which are one of the key challenges to be solved before deployment – still limit these ambitions to small operational domains. In order to ensure safe operation of automated vehicles in more extensive operational domains, comprehensive approaches towards safety are required. Additionally, the effectiveness of these approaches must be proven for all relevant operational scenarios. Hence, we have proposed the workshop on ''Ensuring and Validating Safety for Automated Vehicles'' in order to promote scientific exchange in this field. Among others, topics such as safety concepts, hazard analyses, handling of challenging or critical situations, concepts for testing and validating functionality of automated vehicles, as well as the role of self-perception/introspection are welcome contributions upon approval. For further details, please refer to the attached PDF.

Please keep checking on the Automated Vehicles Symposium website for newer information about the breakout sessions and plenary talks, which will be updated continuously over the coming weeks as more of these get settled.

Best regards,

Steve Shladover

Chair AHB30 – Committee on Vehicle-Highway Automation