Towards common ethical and safe ‘behaviour’ standards for automated vehicles

Automated vehicles (AVs) aim to dramatically improve traffic safety by reducing or eliminating human error, which remains the leading cause of road crashes. However, commonly accepted standards for the ‘safe driving behaviour of machines’ are pending and urgently needed. Unless a common understanding of safety as a design value is achieved,...

Safety Performance Boundary Identification of Highly Automated Vehicles: A Surrogate Model-Based Gradient Descent Searching Approach

Highly automated vehicles (HAVs) have been introduced to the transportation system for the purpose of providing safer mobility. Considering the expected long co-existence period of HAVs and human-driven vehicles (HDVs), the safety operation of HAVs interacting with HDVs needs to be verified. To achieve this, HAVs' Operational Design Domain ...

Impact of distracting activities and drivers’ cognitive failures on driving performance

The rapid increase in the availability of smartphones and other infotainment devices, and their widespread use while driving, contributes significantly to car crash rates. Understanding of the impact of distracting activities on drivers’ behavior is essential in order to support the development of effective technology and policy solutions to...

Effect of passing zone length on operation and safety of two-lane rural highways in Uganda

This paper presents a methodology to assess the effect of the length of passing zone on the operation and safety of two-lane rural highways based on the probability and the rate of passing maneuvers ending in a no-passing zone. The methodology was applied using observed passing maneuver data collected with tripod-mounted camcorders at passing...