This paper deals with scenario road automation design based on a safety approach. The study shows the potential safety/capacity benefice of some different new future technologies that could be introduced in the highway. Two scenarios are presented, which correspond of combination of different new best technologies that lead to interesting results. The chosen safety criteria is based on the ability of the cars to avoid collisions. It corresponds to the following two emergency situations: firstly a vehicle is suddenly braking until stop or secondly an obstacle is present in the road. In first safety level, we ensure that all vehicles located behind the suddenly braking until stop car, can stop without any collisions. With respect to this assumption a minimal safety distance function of speed, capacities to break, and automatism or driver time reaction is computed. This distance is directly translated into a capacity for a single lane and corresponds somehow of the maximal lane capacity. In second level safety, we cannot ensure that there will be no collisions since an obstacle can be located suddenly a few meters in front of a vehicle. But we can define safety indication as the mean number of collisions that probably will happen. Obviously the safety indication will depend on the distances between vehicles, and therefore is linked with the capacity of a lane. Therefore the main problem consists of finding the best combination of technologies that give a higher capacity and a smaller safety indication. (A*)
Abstract