Automated Highway Systems Operating Strategies and Events: A Driver’s Perspective

Automated Highway Systems (AHS) have the potential for offering large capacity and safety gains without requiring significant amounts of additional right-of-way. Since the general public will be the users of the AHS, human factors must play a pivotal role in the research and development of AVCS technologies and AHS operation. This paper focuses on fully automated AHS. To ensure the identification of all major human factors issues, we have identified major options for operating fully automated AHS. These options are categorized in the following four dimensions: separation of traffic, transitions between manual and automated driving, normal automated driving and emergency response. Attributes critical to AHS human factors include (i) possible isolation of automated traffic from the manual traffic, (ii) possible separations among automated traffic by lane barriers, and (iii) the vehicle-following rule. We propose six scenarios featuring variations in these attributes. To ensure the identification of all major compounding attribute combinations, detailed operational events, from the perspective of the driver, are identified. The AHS scenarios proposed in this paper are designed for the study of human factors in fully automated AHS. Further scrutiny into these scenarios is required for other studies.