Federal Highway Administration National Dialogue on Highway Automation: October 24-25, 2018 Operations Workshop Summary

Collaboration Corner

Format

The Collaboration Corner consisted of a career-fair-style setup with seven stations for collecting different types of information from stakeholders. This setup encouraged a highly interactive session, with participants on their feet and moving from station to station. USDOT staff members were located at each station to encourage participation, clarify the exercise, engage in discussion, and ask follow-up questions. Participants were allowed to move at their own pace but were provided with informal prompts to move to a new station every 15 minutes. Information was collected at each station through two methods:

• Sticky note exercise—Attendees used sticky notes to respond to a specific prompt, which was presented on posters at each station. This was a public form of communication that allowed attendees to view and engage with their colleagues' suggestions.
• Suggestion box—Participants wrote their questions, suggestions, or other input on an index card and placed it into a suggestion box. This was a more private form of communication that allowed attendees to provide information that they may not have been comfortable sharing in a public forum.

Stakeholders provided input across the following seven stations:

1. FHWA Operations Research Showcase: Highlighting existing FHWA research
2. Operational Environments and Use Cases: Enabling AV operation in all environments
3. Preparing State and Local Agencies for Automation: Building capacity and providing guidance
4. Data: Assessing critical data needs for traffic operations decisionmaking
5. Terminology: Building our lexicon around highway automation
6. Research Needs: Evaluating current research or new research to consider
7. Parking Lot: What is missing?

The following section summarizes key themes and takeaways for each topic.

FHWA Operations Research Showcase

At the FHWA Operations Research Showcase, representatives from the FHWA Office of Operations R&D presented videos and fact sheets about their current research initiatives. The showcase focused on cooperative automation research, which investigates platooning, speed harmonization, lane changing, and other capabilities of vehicles that can communicate with other vehicles and infrastructure. Special emphasis was placed on CARMA: the Cooperative Automation Research Mobility Applications³ technology. CARMA is an open source software platform that has enabled the testing of cooperative automated driving systems (CADS) use cases.

FHWA Operations staff provided information about the linkage of transportation systems management and operations and automation. Participants provided feedback on FHWA's existing research portfolio and suggestions for future research.

Table 1. Participant Input: Operations Research

Participant Input: Research Suggestions
Impact of pavement marking configurations, patterns, and spacing on AV performance. Impacts of heavy duty AVs on pavement conditions. Use of roadside hardware as reference points to improve high definitions maps.

Operational Environments and Use Cases

At the Operational Environments and Use Cases station, participants used sticky notes to answer the following questions:

1. What are different use cases and operational design domains for automated vehicles?
2. What are the operations challenges?
3. What operations strategies can address challenging AV Operational Design Domains?

Table 2. Participant Input: Operational Environment and Use Cases

Most Challenging Use Cases and ODDs
Everyday occurrences that require vehicles to stop, including pedestrians crossing the road, passengers entering and exiting transit and school buses, and railroad at-grade crossings. Mixed use cases emphasizing unpredictable human behavior, such as aggressive human driving and both pedestrian and bicyclist movements. Complicated road configurations such as multi-leg intersections, diverging diamond interchanges, roundabouts, one-way bridges, and narrow residential streets. Signs, signals, markings—importance of testing AV interaction with a variety of road infrastructure such as pavement markings, reversible lanes, dynamic message signs, and deteriorating or destroyed signs.
Operations Challenges
Integrating dynamic shoulder lanes on freeways and urban streets or installing dynamic and connected control devices alongside static devices in mixed-use environments. Special events, including inclement weather, maintenance events, incidents requiring dynamic message sign communications, and road closures.
Operations Solutions
Emergency-specific planning—examples included establishing reserved radio frequency for emergency vehicles to broadcast basic safety messages and developing predefined evacuation routes that assume no central communication. Standard and consistent pavement markings—various opinions were expressed about specific types and sizes of pavement markings that should be made standard, with emphasis on the need for nationwide consistency. Updates to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), and its consistent use and interpretation.

Preparing State and Local Agencies for Automation

At the Preparing State and Local Agencies for Automation station, participants used sticky notes to answer the following questions:

1. What are your workforce development and training needs around automated vehicles?
2. What types of technical assistance or guidance would be useful?

Table 3. Participant Input: Preparing State and Local Agencies

Workforce Development
Balancing funding priorities. Recruiting public sector talent. Continuing education and training for current highway ecosystem. Maintaining the knowledge of the current ecosystem (e.g., maintenance workers, traffic management and safety operations, government employees). Providing training among those with various levels of education.
Technical Assistance
Determining priorities for infrastructure upgrades and ITS maintenance. Piloting and testing resources, including published results and findings, and advice on how to conduct tests. Supporting interpretation and implementation of standards for AV equipment and infrastructure.
Guidance
Defining roles and clarifying incentives with respect to highway automation deployment. Developing requirements and readiness guidance for various types of equipment (e.g., traffic control devices (TCDs), signaling equipment, vehicles, intelligent transportation system (ITS) equipment, pavement markings, connected vehicle infrastructure).

Data

At the Data station, participants used sticky notes to answer the following questions:

1. What are the key data needs required for effective traffic operations decision making?
2. How can data best be shared among agencies to ensure interoperability and building upon best practices?

Table 4. Participant Input: Data

Data Needs for Operations
Desire for data submitted by vehicles to inform opportunities for redesigning curb use, improving infrastructure, identifying near-miss conditions, and communicating weather conditions in real time. Clarification of the distinction between public and private data, and the associated expectations. Clarification of statutory authority for data collection. Data standardization and guidance with respect to data ownership, data-sharing agreements, and data emerging from Transportation Management Centers (TMCs). Request for data and/or data standards related to basic safety messages and security protocols. Desire for dissemination of real-time data (e.g., currently occurring weather event).
Data Sharing Opportunities
Requests for consistency in data structures and formatting. Data sharing to support dynamic and adaptive systems (e.g., Connected and Autonomous Vehicles [CAVs] as mobile sensors for adaptive signal timing; dynamic rerouting to ease congestion). Desire for publicly accessible data.

Terminology

Participants shared the most common terminology that they hear when discussing AVs and indicated which terms are helpful and which are confusing. They placed these terms along two axes to show how these terms are used. The vertical axis represented the frequency with which these terms are used, and the horizontal axis represented the level of confusion surrounding the use of these terms. Table 5 illustrates the terms placed into each quadrant.

Table 5. Participant Input: Terminology

	Confusing	Clear
Frequency	DSRC OEM CAV Automated vs Autonomous CAV or CV/AV? What is “A”? Automated or Autonomous? Connected (provider perspective) Standards and standardization―what it is and what it isn't Use cases (strategies) Signal phase and timing (SPaT); 5G; Integration	5G DSRC Connected (infrastructure perspective) Self-driving Technologies by different names (e.g., forward collision, parking assist, lane assist), and what each actually does
	ODD 5.9 gHz CARMA IOO

Research Needs

Participants identified the potential research areas for automation and discussed who should conduct the research and in what timeframe. Color-coded sticky notes were used to differentiate between public and private sector research needs, and participants were asked to categorize research needs as near-term (by 2020) or longer-term (by 2020 or later).

Table 6. Participant Input: Research Needs

Public Sector
Obtain better understanding of driver distraction (near-term). Investigate the interactions between AVs and specific infrastructure (e.g., temporary infrastructure including cones, raised reflective markings) (near-term). Study how AVs behave in a range of specific use cases (near-term).
Private Sector
Explore how AVs interact with and impact infrastructure such as traffic lights, pavement, and bridges (longer term). Conduct research to better understand how AVs will behave in various types of mixed fleets (longer term). Develop and test methods to efficiently route AVs. Methods might incorporate dynamic speed limits, ride sharing, detour routes, and dynamic signal timing, among other elements (near-term). Require sensor calibration based on vehicle make, model, and year (near-term).

Parking Lot

Any remaining questions and comments that did not cleanly fit into the other topic areas were included in this topic area. Topics included:

• Minimizing the risk of AV passengers interfering with driving, particularly impaired driving
• Addressing security issues
• Understanding tort liability for public agencies
• Interest in requiring annual AV safety inspections nationwide
• Deployment of AVs with social equity and accessible mobility in mind
• Concerns about AV detection of and/or connectivity with pedestrians