Safety-centred analysis of transition stages to traffic with fully autonomous vehicles

The aim of this paper is to highlight and investigate the effects of increasing presence rate of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in terms of traffic safety and traffic flow characteristics. For this purpose, using existing driver models in traffic simulator SUMO we identify and analyze those parameters that characterize and distinguish AVs’ driving from manual driving in a heterogeneous traffic context. While it is essential to identify the parameters for traffic flow characteristics of heterogeneous fleets compared to homogeneous ones comprising manually driven vehicles (MV) only (i.e. current status), the safety aspects must be also accounted for. In order to combine these two fundamental aspects of heterogeneous traffic, we used a complete description of a highway driving scenario. The scenario integrates the perceptions of different type of vehicles (i.e. AV and MV) involved and the reaction times of human drivers and decision-making units of autonomous vehicles, to explore the impact of both the rate of AV presence and the perturbation in perception capabilities in highway scenarios.