Policy & Planning

In the era of post-autonomy when automated vehicles are prevalent, there will be revolutionary changes to the transportation system. From auto ownership to auto usage, from trip planning to road traffic management, even from the perspective of law enforcement, almost every aspect of an autonomous transportation system will differ from the existing one. To prepare for these changes, it is desirable to study a variety of essential policy and technical issues an autonomous vehicle system may face, including automated vehicle adoption pathway, logistic operations of fleets, social acceptance, consumer choice and business operation, as well as sustainability assessment. Although an automated future is defined as desirable, simply saying so does not map a route from here to there. The lack of viable deployment pathways was a huge impediment to past automation efforts and many obstacles remain despite improvements in technology. Shared use of automated vehicles is one promising form of automated vehicle fleet adoption. However, even within the narrower field of shared automated vehicles (SAVs), all academic work to date assumes relatively mature systems. CCAT researchers will seek to fill this gap by identifying a pathway for sharing to emerge in an automated vehicle context, providing practical and actionable knowledge to planners, governments, and private companies on what types of SAV systems can effectively be deployed and where.

Research Focusing on Policy & Planning


Lane Management in the Era of CAV Deployment
Principal Investigator:
Mohammad Miralinaghi, Samuel Labi, & Shreyas Sundaram
Research Thrusts: Infrastructure Design & Management, Modeling & Implementation, Policy & Planning