CCAD

Distributed decision support system for cooperative connected and autonomous driving in complex environments

Project, funded by: FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación–Agencia Estatal de Investigación

Proyectos de I+D Retos Investigación 2020-23

Cooperative, connected and autonomous driving is an important technological advance that will influence and change our mobility and quality of life in the future. Cooperative driving of connected vehicles plays a key role in European transport policy, as it supports several of its social objectives and challenges, such as road safety, congestion, decarbonization, social inclusion, etc. Cooperative systems can be seen as catalysts for these challenges, as they provide additional elements of perception, decision and action supported by communications, which direct us towards cooperative autonomous driving.

Traffic rules establish restrictions so that a vehicle can move on the road, covering aspects such as speed, lane change movements, turnings, overtakings, etc. Nowadays, standards are implemented at the infrastructure level and are independent of the level of automation in the vehicle. As automation levels increase, connectivity is a critical aspect due to the interactions needed between all elements involved to meet traffic standards. To ensure productive development of cooperative, connected and autonomous driving, each participant must also know where it is located not only geographically but also digitally in relation to the other stakeholders in this connected network.
For these reasons, the objective of this project is focused on the research and development of technologies with projection towards cooperative, connected and autonomous driving. In this line, the demonstrators of operation of the proposed system will be associated with complex driving scenarios, with the aim of providing solutions to the problems identified in shared traffic. In addition, it is intended to study the impact that these technologies will have on drivers of vehicles located in the first levels of automation, with the intention of establishing the basis rules that guarantee coexistence in traffic shared between different types of vehicles, defining decision rules for driving in critical situations.
The proposed cooperative system will be based on the development of a high-level decision support system that will be hosted in the cloud and will use the information provided by sensors on board in vehicles and present in the infrastructure. This information will be processed in real time using the computational capacity of the cloud and will allow to extract rules of action in order to ensure that the different vehicles involved cooperate and share the road in an optimal and reliable way, facilitating the shared traffic.