TransAID Deliverable 8.1: Stakeholder consultation report (final version)
The TransAID project defines, develops and evaluates traffic management measures based on C-ITS equipped road infrastructure to eliminate or mitigate the negative effects of Transition of Control (ToC) along Transition Areas in future mixed traffic scenarios where automated, cooperative, and conventional vehicles will coexist. This document summarises the results of the stakeholder consultation activities of the TransAID project. For TransAID, the most relevant stakeholders are transport authorities and policy makers, road operators, vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, road infrastructure and traffic service providers, academia and knowledge institutes, future product owners and standardisation bodies. The consultation activities aimed to gather feedbacks on the project choices (selected use cases, scenarios, modelling solutions, implementation approaches) as well as on the achieved results. Such feedbacks were necessary to confirm the validity of the project's work, and to adapt, whenever possible and needed, its implementation while running. Consultation also allowed obtaining the stakeholders' view on the impact of prospective automated vehicles introduction. Finally, the stakeholders were asked about their ambitions and interests related to role and responsibilities in future scenarios of automated vehicle presence. Hearing about these last two aspects was necessary to identify possible activities beyond the TransAID project's duration. A summary of 9 stakeholder consultation events is provided in this deliverable: Main stakeholder workshops - TransAID-MAVEN-CoExist Stakeholder workshop, 10 October 2017, Brussels - TransAID-INFRAMIX stakeholder workshop, 9 October 2019, Graz - TransAID final event, stakeholder workshop, 2 July 2020, online International liaison activities - TransAID-U.S. CAMP expert meeting, 25 July 2019, Detroit - TransAID + ITS Japan / UtmobI expert meeting, 7-8 April 2020, online Additional stakeholder consultation opportunities - TransAID session and survey, 8 June 2019, IEEE-IV, Paris - EU EIP workshop on ODD, 1 October 2019, Turin - International workshop on ODD, 22 October 2019, Singapore - Joint dissemination of H2020, CEDR projects and other initiatives related to CAVs and Infrastructure, 3 March 2020, Brussels For each stakeholder consultation event, this deliverable gives a detailed description of the scope and aim, participants, plenary and break-out sessions, survey results (when applicable) and implications to the TransAID work. The main common findings that have been identified throughout the various events are listed in the following along with the major implications for TransAID and/or any similar follow-up activity: - Managing mixed traffic in transition areas is still an almost unexplored field. Despite transition areas are recognized as a prospective problem, very little is known or has been studied about it. This simple acknowledgment confirms the need and timeliness of TransAID. - Due to the uncertainty about many technical aspects related to the introduction of AD, it was difficult for transport authorities and traffic managers to provide insights on aspects to be considered for the selection of TransAID use cases and scenarios. Nevertheless, the majority of use cases and scenarios finally selected by TransAID were recognized to be reasonably generic, yet addressing recurrent problems, and hence deemed useful for real-world application. - Connectivity was recognized as a key enabler to extend the Operational Design Domain (ODD) of AD. In this sense, most experts foresee application of hybrid solutions with both ITS-G5 and cellular connectivity capabilities. For this purpose, TransAID's assumption of digitalizing the road infrastructure with additional sensing, computing and communication capabilities was acknowledged to be correct, even if maybe not realisable in the short term. - TransAID traffic management allowing the road infrastructure to provide additional information to CAVs was also recognized as a valid approach in almost all the consultation and twinning events. In this context, European and Japanese stakeholders firmly defend the use of infrastructure support for automated driving and even highlight the need to adapt traffic rules for automation or change the legal frameworks (e.g. authorize the road infrastructure to provide advices that break the traffic rules if needed). On the contrary, US stakeholders are very hesitant and fear possible financial consequences resulting from liability issues. - Remote operation is an emerging possible solution at least for management of level 4 automated public transport (e.g. autonomous shuttles or pods) in edge cases and transition areas, when the vehicles operate without a steward in the vehicle. This use case is not considered by TransAID, and hence it would be interesting to investigate its effectiveness with similar evaluations means as those utilized by TransAID. - Sensitivity of information around OEMs' current and future implementations has prevented obtaining commonly recognized functional descriptions reusable for modelling and simulations of automated vehicles behaviours. Despite that, the modelling solutions developed in the project under the consultancy of Hyundai were considered adequate and meaningful by the inquired stakeholders. - For the TransAID measures to work effectively, vehicle AD capabilities shall be known by the infrastructure, and infrastructure (support) capabilities shall be known by OEMs. Consequently, sharing this data in both directions is needed. From the consultation, this approach was welcomed by infrastructure stakeholders while OEMs were more hesitant mostly due to competition and liability implications arising from sensitivity of the shared information. To preserve sensitivity of information, the TransAID "intermediary service" concept (see TransAID D4.3) was generally supported, but its practical application in real-world deployment scenarios would need to be proven. - In addition, it is considered needed to derive clear and unambiguous definitions of AD ODDs for adoption at both OEMs and infrastructure side. Transport Authorities could use this information for allowing vehicles of different automation capabilities to use specific roads or to provide additional physical of digital support where needed. Nevertheless, defining ODDs is a complex task for the involved stakeholders, and despite initial activities have been started and proposals have been made, there is still a long way to go. - From an even more generic perspective, transport authorities (especially cities) are mostly interested in fulfilling their greener, safer and comfort goals and see AD as an opportunity in that direction. For the moment being, they are not favouring a particular automated transport mode in a proactive way. Rather, they seem to be monitoring the situation to apply reactive policies when AD introduction will be more mature and clearer. In fact, adoption of alternative policies like strategically "managing" private CAVs vs. fostering use of MaaS with public automated shuttles will depend on penetration. For TransAID, it is irrelevant which way authorities will choose, as the proposed TransAID solutions can apply irrespectively of the selected automated transport mode. As it can be seen, some of the findings from the consultation events reflect the uncertainty associated to vehicle automation and its evolution in the coming decades. Nevertheless, from the sequence of stakeholder consultation events a steady progression in the collective understanding of the relation between vehicle automation and infrastructure could be observed. The possible implications to the stakeholders involved became also clearer at subsequent events.
