Open Problems in Transportation Engineering with Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

In recent decades, technologies that can lead to fully automated driving have had a rapid development. In this framework, 'road transport automation' can potentially result in significant changes to the operation of road systems throughout the world. It is impossible to foresee how long it will take to realize such potential changes, because there are many uncertainties about both the technologies to deploy, and the policy environment where they should be deployed. 'Full automation' is the future of road transport, but the transition from manual to fully autonomous vehicles is especially dependent on the interactions between humans and automation, but also between automated vehicles and manual vehicles, and between automated vehicles and infrastructure. In the above context, this paper, after introducing some open problems related to automated vehicles, focuses on a particular one, consisting of the simplified evaluation of the equilibrium points achievable by a mixed flow with different percentages of automated vehicles. The aim of the considered problem is to provide a first general estimation of the performance of an existing network in various scenarios, characterized by different percentages of autonomous vehicles and mobility demand. More in detail, a simplified kinematic supply model is introduced to assess the link flow/cost performances, aiming at estimating the potential congestion reduction. An application to a real word network is described, and the relevant results are reported and discussed.