PRE2016 3 Groep11

Introduction

With the expectations of the current car development as well as the current state of the art, it’s highly likely that autonomous cars will cooperate in traffic. The development steps, innovativity and the inventivity of big companies which support the production of autonomous cars, such as Tesla, BMW and Google, are - with an increasing rate of confidence - stating that it will be a matter of years before the first great share of autonomous vehicles on roads will be noticeable.

This will logically result in a mixture of both non-autonomous as well as self-driving vehicles. Autonomous vehicles have abilities with respect to reaction time and affiliation that are way advanced in comparison to human drivers. This will most likely be a cause of some interference between both of the vehicles with respect to the current traffic system. The differences that both vehicles have in reaction -and processing time can be unbeneficial for places where there is an almost continuous amount of much traffic.

This will especially occur in the rings of big cities, where the amount of traffic is big and chaotic most of the time. It is at this place in a city, where almost all other roads of the city can be reached. So these rings will be packed with traffic that has destinations in the city center, but also traffic from the city center that wants to reach out of the city bounds.

This report will be focusing on the development of a new system for traffic lights, so autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles will show more cooperation as well as an improved fluency. This project will look into the effects of a new traffic system that can be utilized on rings in the center of big cities. The density of traffic, the average speed, the passing time and CO2-emission are results that are aimed to look after in this report.

Authors

• 0960493 Tim Houthuijs
• 0934016 Kevin Jenniskens
• 0958509 Matthijs van Raaij
• 0948190 Sarah Rohder
• 0903327 Floris Tulner
• 0945501 Lars Verstraelen

Assignment

Focus

the main focus of this report is concerns the area of: Green wave traffic control .

The more specific focus was to look at the influence of autonomous cars in a green wave.

restrictions on the focus area:

• The green wave will only happen at one big road that makes a loop.
• The big road has a fixed number intersections with traffic lights along the way.
• The traffic is randomly generated a memoryless distribution.

verhaal waarom we dit gekozen hebben

Objectives

research question

our main research question is:

• how high should the ratio of autonomous cars be to make platooning through a green wave efficient.

the side questions of this report are:

• how many of to days cars are going through a green wave?
• how does the platooning work with 0% and 100% autonomous cars?

Approach

To review the changes that might happen in the traffic over the upcoming years, we will focus on making a research report.

Due to the changes in the traffic, there will need to be changes in respect to the traffic system to make the traffic flow more efficient as well as reduce the chance of accidents. The focus lies in a traffic system with a part human driven cars and a part autonomous cars.

We will divide the future into certain timestamps: 5 years, 10 yrs, 20 yrs, etc.

We will also divide traffic up into different situations in order to be able to look into different aspects:

- the highway (lots of cars driving at high speed);

- in the city (crossing and interaction with people);

- countryside (not a lot of traffic).

Assumptions

In order to solve our main problem we need to make some assumptions. these assumptions help us to better address our problem statement. It also helps to break down the problem in its core problems and solutions. By simplifying the problem you make your problem more understandable. So our assumptions we made are the following.

We assume that the current traffic system is suboptimal in terms of:

- Waiting in line for the traffic lights. As well as in terms of safety.

- The current traffic system is also suboptimal in in terms of CO2 emission.

- We also assume that self driving car will be fully autonomous in 20 years from now.

- Robots make less errors than persons.

USE aspect

In order to make a research that sheds light onto every part, we do not only look at the technological side, but also at the USE-side. This means that we will look at the user, society and enterprise aspects that are within a civilisation such as the Netherlands. Each side has its own actors, which bring their own opinions on the matter. These can be in favour, against or indifferent, depending on what side they represent.

User

In the user side of the spectrum, we have the following actors:

- drivers of non-autonomous cars;

- the people inside of autonomous cars;

- and the pedestrians and cyclists.

These actors also have different values, which have to be taken into account. These include safety for the people inside of the autonomous cars as well as for the pedestrians and cyclists. Autonomous cars are safer in general, but with the reduction of the amount of traffic lights, it might be more dangerous for the non-autonomous part of traffic. Another value is the effectivity of traffic, which looks at how much traffic is being regulated, such as traffic lights, which influences how fast people get to their destination.

Society

For the societal aspect, we have the actors being the ANWB and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment.

They look at the pros and cons of the situation. The pros include the increase in safety amoung drivers, as this will rise due to the decrease in accidents. This means that the contribution of insurances will drop, which is beneficial. Another pro is that there will be more jobs for maintenance in traffic, due to the preparation needed for autonomous cars in traffic.

On the other side, there is the reduction of jobs for truck drivers, which lies around 200.000. The difference between rich and poor will also become larger, as the poorer people will not be able to afford autonomous cars.

Enterprise

At the enterprise side, we have got the actors of the producers of the autonomous cars (think of for example Tesla or Google), and software companies that develop traffic systems (examples to be looked up).

These actors also provide certain pros and cons. These include more jobs in the autonomous car industry, large sales for autonomous car producers and lots of jobs in the informational sector. This last one may have an issue as there might not be enough people in this sector.