Automated vehicle depots as an initial step for an automated public transportation

Development of modern cars focuses currently on comfort and safety. The parking pilot is one of the recent innovations for piloted or autonomous driving. Future systems such as highway pilot or traffic jam pilot are current topics of research and will be equipped to new cars within the next years. Cost savings in the commercial vehicle branch is an at least as important driving force. High potential lies in the enhancement of allowed service time for the drivers by assistant systems or even fully automated driving without any driver. These autonomous vehicles are firstly used as airport shuttles, production halls or harbors in restricted areas.

We present a concept, which allows an autonomous driving on cordoned off depots, which are protected against unauthorized access. The concept will include the vehicle washing, the driving to the parking hall and the parking itself. All of this parts needs to be done manually at modern depots. Introducing autonomous driving in these steps can shorten the working time of employees and therefore save money.

To ensure an operation on 24 hours and 7 days a week the automated depot should work without communication from the infrastructure or centralized control towards the vehicles. ... mehrTo identify the requirements for such an autonomous depot system we evaluated the depot infrastructure, working processes and vehicles at various public transportation company including city busses and trams. With these requirements a concept for an autonomous depot was developed. The concepts address measures on the vehicles, the infrastructure of the depot, the safety of persons and vehicles, the legal situation, and the road map of the automated driving.

We present a concept that relies only on sensors, calculation and actuators on board the vehicle without a demand for additional communication, and systems in the infrastructure. Therefore, the depot does not need to be equipped with special hardware. In addition, we are focusing on the depots of public transportation, because the conditions are compatible with European law. In contrast to production halls or harbors, the automated driving inside the depot works with road traffic act compatible signs and markings only. This allows us to use the vehicles on public roads later on. The concept is compatible with all OEMs and implications and requirements for next generation buses of automation level 4 will be addressed in order to build a piloted driving system on the depot.

The proposed measures were chosen such that a variety of existing depots can be retrofitted for autonomous driving. Further, requirements and optimizations for future depots can be derived.

Finally, this paper identifies economic impact and chances of the system to the public transportation company through the implementation of the proposed concept and the savings by shortening the number of employees.