I am sure we have already started to wonder where the last year has gone as we look forward to the festive season and New Year celebrations. 2018 has really flown by for all of us at TaaS Technology – we launched the TaaS brand including the quarterly digital magazine and inaugural TaaS Technology event.

With this being the final issue of 2018, we are excited to be announcing the launch of the TaaS Technology 2019 events, which will include 2 co-located events looking at CAVs, EVs, Battery/Energy, Infrastructure and Future Mobility Technologies.

Technology is more deeply affecting the future of mobility than any time since the birth of the automobile. Gain key insights into forces shaping transportation’s future through TaaS Magazine and at the TaaS Technology conference.

Today's economies are dramatically changing, triggered by development in emerging markets, the accelerated rise of new technologies, sustainability policies, and changing consumer preferences that include how people view the need for vehicle ownership. Digitisation and new business models have revolutionised other industries, and transportation will be no exception. For the automotive sector, these forces are giving rise to four disruptive technology‐driven trends: diverse mobility, autonomous driving, electrification, and connectivity.

This final issue of TaaS Technology magazine for the year welcomes contributions Aimsun, door2door, FiveAI, ITS UK, Ridecell and many more.

As we close out 2018, TaaS Technology would like to thank all of our readers, conference partners, speakers and delegates for your continued support and we look forward to a fantastic 2019 and helping to connect, inform and inspire the future mobility industry. There continues to be fantastic investment and genuine excitement about driving forward the impending revolution in mobility and at the forefront we should see this as an opportunity to save lives, improve the environment we live in and bring mobility to all.

Enjoy issue 3 and see you in 2019!

In phase 1 we have two complementary public urban testbed environments, a controlled and semi-controlled test environment, and a high-speed limit handling facility. Between them it will provide a comprehensive suite of testbed environments. In addition to this, each testbed is developing simulated and virtual testing capabilities. They are all working together to ensure a connected community for the UK. We are also in the process of evaluating bids to fill in the gaps with two further projects. Meridian Mobility 2, a data exchange project, will facilitate the exchange of data, to test, develop and demonstrate CAV opportunities. Meridian Mobility 3 will deliver further physical test environments for parking, highway and rural environments which will complete the UK’s capability to representatively test any environment around the country and much of the global market.

Looking at how far we’ve come and how far there is to travel ahead of us we must pause to determine what should be done next. We can see how developments have been made and we have learnt a great deal over the past couple of decades with the introduction of autonomous features in vehicles. We are way beyond Level 0, where drivers control all aspects of the vehicle, and are slowly but surely introducing more automated features into vehicles from adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking to lane change assist. It’s an exciting time but we are still a long way off achieving a level of safety for a widely connected autonomous system and that’s why it’s more important than ever to focus our efforts in the right areas.

As previously highlighted the route to a safe, sustainable and beneficial deployment of CAVs is a collaborative one. It requires the efforts of cities, mobility providers, automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, tech companies, infrastructure providers, telecoms companies and many more.

But how do we identify where additional support is required, and when does the government intervene? One way we are doing this is to look at a roadmap for a safe, sustainable and beneficial CAV sector. It is important to look from R&D all the way through to deployment. The CAV ecosystem is broad and encompasses many individual elements which must work together to be greater than the sum of its parts. The key themes include cyber security, safety, simulation, services, vehicle and infrastructure. Each of these components faces its own challenges and timelines that we must overcome.

Meridian sits at the heart of this to determine, on behalf of the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), what needs be done. We work to target specific interventions, such as looking at where there are market failures and what we can do to progress the development of CAV technologies through testing facilities in the UK.

Focusing on collaboration, we are creating strategic partnerships with expert organisations to refine the UK’s understanding of this CAV ecosystem and to map the path ahead of us. One thing is clear, we must seek to work across sectors, across organisations, across departments and across the competitive landscape to deliver this future.

It’s a future that is bristling with potential, with many forecasts of the economic benefits ranging from £28bn-£52bn in the UK alone. But beyond this CAVs must deliver societal benefits including increased mobility, improved customer journeys, reduced costs and solve the last mile goods delivery problem.

However, there isn’t a straight road to the adoption of CAV and its technologies. This will hinge on public acceptance, whereby individual concerns over safety and data will need to be addressed. We need to understand what people’s perceptions of CAVs are and the impact that may have on how they interact and use these new mobility solutions.

Trust is key for unlocking the benefits of connected and autonomous vehicles. Change is coming, but only if it is an accepted mode of transport by all. Without trust consumers will be averse to this new connected future which can provide so many benefits for all. We are confident that with a concerted, positive effort this will be achieved, and the UK will be at the forefront of both the development and the adoption of this revolution.

Barely a week goes by where we don’t see a story splashed across the news featuring the latest developments in autonomous vehicles. Innovations are constantly being announced by larger organisations such as Tesla and Ford – these capture our imagination and provide us with an exciting glimpse into the not-so-distant future.

But while we continue to ponder how technology could revolutionise privately-owned vehicles in years to come, we might also ask what will happen to the rest of the transport industry. Our towns and cities are only likely to become more congested as the population continues to grow. So, rather than relying on our own vehicles to travel around, we’ll need access to a variety of mobility options.

This is where the TaaS model will come into its own – it will encompass all modes of transport and provide us with convenience, flexibility and affordability when travelling. Via a single integrated app, users will be able to access a single mobility service on-demand, and quickly view details such as journey times and the cost of their whole trip. Connecting our transport services will allow people to get from the start to the end of their journey seamlessly – the first stage of which might involve being picked up by an automated vehicle at home, and the final one a bus ride through town.

A connected system is the end goal. But the question is, how are we going to reach this point?

The first stages are in place

The groundwork for this future ‘as-a-service’ model has already been laid down to a certain extent. Popular ride-sharing and car-sharing services such as BlaBlaCar and Liftshare currently offer the public a convenient, affordable and environmentally-friendly alternative to driving their own vehicle. And technology enhances our experience in scheduling and fulfilling these journeys – in many cases, you can log into an app to check journey times or see where the nearest vehicle is located.

We’ve embraced these newer ways of getting around, and we’re going to see an ever-growing number of on-demand services. Take the example of the recent trial of a driverless bus by operator Stagecoach – this development highlights the gradual shift we’re making towards a TaaS run future. We’ll need to continue building connections between all modes of travel to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Taxi technology is facilitating collaboration

For the complex transport model of the future to work, each element of the network will need to operate in sync. Integrating multiple options in such a way will make the consumer’s life easier in getting from A to B. We’ll be able to see details for each journey in one place and pay for it all at the touch of a button.

The great news is that the technology which taxis are already using can pave the way in this march towards a frictionless transport system. Automated booking and dispatch systems enable taxi firms to work in tandem with car rental companies and car sharing services, keeping costs down and saving time too. Pick up and drop off services, for holidays or business travel for example, will become a lot easier to manage with several transport partners working in collaboration.

The information being gathered by taxi technology isn’t just for the public’s benefit either – it’s advantageous for businesses. It’s providing firms and their drivers with the intelligence they need to increase booking numbers, thus improving business performance and profitability.

If firms know where and when there are more jobs available, they can optimise how they manage their fleet. In a driverless world, this level of insight will serve us well; being able to accurately predict demand and travel habits would mean fewer empty cars clogging up our roads and decreased congestion in urban areas. 

Taxi firms collect and hold valuable data

The TaaS network of the future will rely heavily on how organisations are able to use data. We’ll require up-to-date information on vehicle locations and public transport for trips to run smoothly. Not only that, personal preferences will need to be communicated between individuals and transport providers, so that each journey is tailored to their needs. Sharing information will therefore become essential for journey planning. 

With the vast amount of information they hold on individual trips and the millions of journeys they are making every day, taxis are an excellent source of data. Insights collected by firms are hugely advantageous in helping us to make informed decisions – both for the smart city planner who is building our physical urban infrastructure, and the OEM who is manufacturing our self-driving vehicles.

Taxis were the first innovators in the TaaS space – arguably they have been providing a Vehicle-as-a-Service for decades. They were the first to track how and when people made their everyday trips for work, travel and leisure. Thanks to taxis, we also know the most well-used routes around our towns and cities. And, crucially, we know when people use them – and when they don’t.

Those people now responsible for moving us towards a ‘Smart’, frictionless future of mobility would do well to follow in the footsteps of taxis. As key players in the mobility space, they are well-placed to lead this transport revolution and help us get to where we want to be. The taxi industry really is the best friend transport innovators didn’t know they had. 

1898, was the year of automotive invention by Herr Ferdinand Porsche, of the world’s first Electric Vehicle (EV) named Porsche P1. The following year, Herr Porsche won Gold in the Berlin international exhibition’s Motor Car Race. The event had 120 exhibitors, including 19 makers of EV. The historic race was a return trip from Berlin to Zehlendorf. Herr Porsche with 3 passengers in his P1 crossed the finish line with an 18-minute lead! He was way ahead of his times, he invented the Wheel-Hub Engine (electric motor called ‘Octagon’ attached to the wheel). He designed, developed and demonstrated the All-Wheel Drive vehicle as well as a Hybrid Electric-Petrol vehicle. Decades later, NASA applied All-Wheel Drive design concept in the Moon Rover. Despite his brilliant inventions and sales of about 300 EV’s, ironically, diesel and gasoline powered vehicles, prevailed all-through history, significantly impacting the course of human development, albeit, with a heavy price. The human race has staged wars for the control of fossil fuels. In 2006, a documentary titled “An Inconvenient Truth” illustrated the impact of polluting our planet and upsetting the delicate balance maintained by Mother Nature. We have a responsibility to ‘not borrow more than what we need’ from Earth’s finite resources and from our future generations. Let us pledge to make a change today, to an eco-friendly way of life, being fully awake and aware that change lies within each of us.

I sometimes wonder… could there be a parallel universe, wherein, Herr Porsche’s P1 EV was fully commercialised and adopted by the industry in the formative years of automotive development, thus giving rise to a new world order. EVs would have become mainstream mobility solution around the world and governments would have built the charging infrastructure to ensure energy flows through the mobility ecosystem. We may have had a greener planet, where traffic was free of pollutants: noise and exhaust. A world which would have built advanced Smart Mobility Solutions powered by Solar energy, perhaps even vehicles powered by Hydrogen where the exhaust produces water. A world, where, it is but a privilege of a few to drive a personal car (just like it is to own a horse today!). Then again, the blaring noise that seeps through an open window, from the streets down below, breaks my reverie. 

India has its own visionary automobile engineer: Mr.Chetan Maini, the man who founded REVA Electric Car in the 1990’s, designed, built and sold to India and to the world. Clearly, this was a commendable and a bold achievement, given that, the EV ecosystem was not even at the concept stage then. “Fortune favours the bold”, they say and it did indeed; Mahindra invested in REVA and the rest is history in the making.

In the new millennium, Elon Musk launched TESLA. He made an unprecedented move to start manufacturing EV in the Silicon Valley. TESLA faced ridicule, at first, criticism on its product and business model, even survived near bankruptcy, but team TESLA endured and emerged as a force to reckon in the business of new age EVs. The only one, yet, to achieve ‘Over-The-Air’ push updates of its Operating System to fix bugs and offer features upgrades, just like it is done on a smartphone.

Fossil Fuel Dinosaurs of Today

I remember, my days, twenty years ago, as a trainee working on projects in the diesel pump assembly line in (MICO) Bosch’s Bangalore factory. 386 components were required to produce a pump: the heart of the diesel engine. Compare that to an Electric Vehicle, a finished product has only 18 moving parts, they say!

The automotive industry, is broadly, a 3-tier inverted triangle. At the base layer (TIER2) are the component manufacturers. In the middle (Tier 1), are companies that produce the sub-assemblies. The uppermost tier is occupied by the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer); they assemble the automobile and produce branded car models that are stocked and distributed across retail channels that sell at showrooms. In essence, ‘Value’ created, increases at it moves upward across each layer of this structure, with maximum ‘Value’ being created, captured and delivered by the branded products offered by the OEM. It was designed to operate in a Business-to-Business (B2B) model, but, the industry is transforming rapidly and adding connected service platforms to serve the market with a B2C business model. A product based value proposition is mutating into a smart mobility solutions value chain that delivers multi-modal mobility on demand to the consumer.

Furthermore, over the past 130 years, the industry has grown into a mature and robust structure, that has achieved manufacturing excellence and given rise to several innovations such as the Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing, Toyota Quality Management (TQM) system and fully robotised factory operations.

The weakest link of automotive manufacturing world is its complexity that creates a very long cycle time (3-5 years) to produce new vehicle platforms and products thereof. Thousands of precision components are manufactured all over the world, sourced and supplied into assembly lines in factories that were built on large areas of land and huge investment of capital. BICEPS, is a useful acronym for: BODY, INTERIOR, CHASIS, ELECTRICAL/ELECTRONIC, POWERTRAIN & SOFTWARE to comprehend, at a high level, the various sub-systems that are integrated by an OEM to produce a modern automobile. Compare that, to a Google’s self-driving car: the prototype was built in a ‘quintessential American Garage’ with custom made sub-systems. Google’s self-driving car company: WAYMO claims to have the most experience in cumulative road testing miles of self-driving cars as compared to any of the auto OEM’s in the race to produce a fully autonomous vehicle.

Electric Horse Farms

2 million lines of software code are required to build a Space Shuttle, similarly, 20 million lines of code goes into making an Aeroplane and 200 million lines of code are written to build a Luxury Car that is powered by 125 Electronic Control Units (ECUs)!

Another, very interesting feature, common to all three modes of transport is the ‘AUTOPILOT’ which allows the machine to take over manual controls from the pilot (or driver). About 15-20% of ‘bill-of-material’ (BOM) cost of a luxury sedan is attributed to embedded software. In about a decade, I foresee that automotive factories will be akin to smartphone production lines. Legacy production concepts will give way to ‘Additive’ manufacturing processes. Artificial Intelligence (A.I) will run robotic plants that assemble vehicles in record time. Centralised factory master control cockpits will allow remote site operations in sync with each other, self-correcting, evolving an optimal smart manufacturing rhythm.  Predictive maintenance will be the order of the day as all plant machinery will be connected in real-time to an A.I. powered cloud. Blockchain will enable secure manufacturing data creation, processing and access across various commercial entities that are part of the automotive supply chain.

Automobiles of the future will be built using materials called nanocomposites (as opposed to metal-based) in the Body and Interiors. Graphene (single atom layer of graphite) demonstrates photo-electrochemical properties in dye sensitised Solar cells (releases electrons when exposed to Sunlight). Now, imagine a car painted with layers of Graphene based paint, producing electricity from Solar energy augmented and accelerated by the power drawn from very high density energy storage devices called Super capacitors that have Graphene conductive plates in them. Further, Graphene will also improve existing Lithium-ion based battery technologies, in EVs and Hybrid Vehicles. Battery Management Systems (BMS) will be integrated with the operating systems of the automobile and ensure real-time monitoring and control of energy flow in the vehicle providing display parameters such as: Distance to Empty (DTE), State of Charge (SoC) and State of Health (SoH). Real-time navigation systems in sync with BMS will enable quick identification of battery charging stations located in a smart city ecosystem.

Future of our Future

The Universe is about 13 billion years old, in that vast expanse of time, human brain evolved over a billion years or so. Our conquests within our collective consciousness has given rise to human growth and prosperity. The extent of our understanding of the various elements that make up the universe we live in, is, at best, nascent. We have a long way to go before we crack the code of sustainable eco-friendly development that leads to happier and more fulfilling lives. Insofar, we have come to understand, through experiential learning that sharing, crowd sourcing, giving back leads to positive growth and a happier people, whereas, investing in ‘narrow’ application technologies to achieve world dominance leads not to sustainable success. Let us participate with pure intentions to create legacies that are seeds to a better world 2.0!

The VeSyMA – rFpro toolchain

VeSyMA provides reusable component-oriented models which enable engineers to study the behaviour of the same single models in all desired scenarios. This can range from isolated R&D style bench tests to vehicle laboratory tests, controlled dynamic vehicle tests and full-scale open world driving complete with traffic and pedestrian interactions.

With its modular approach to modelling a full vehicle, VeSyMA is comprised of the cornerstone VeSyMA library which has 6 subject specific extension libraries built upon it. By itself, the VeSyMA library defines vehicle and subsystem level templates along with models capable of conducting longitudinal based studies. Templates included in the VeSyMA library define all subsystem boundaries of models in the subject extension libraries, which means any model from any VeSyMA suite of libraries can be deployed in a VeSyMA vehicle model.

An example vehicle model built from a VeSyMA showing how the VeSyMA subject libraries can be deployed together

Preparing a vehicle model for real-time

Speed of simulation is, as one would expect, of consideration when developing a model for real-time running. In other words, it must run quickly enough on the target machine to complete each time step of simulation within the specified time step. Within the DiL library, there are mock simulation environments which enable the user to test the performance of the vehicle model using real time settings; these functions and model also analyse the results to inform the user on how the model performs, indicating which elements and components need to be revised to improve performance. This includes advising the user of what settings should be adjusted within rFpro to accommodate the vehicle model.

With the vehicle model selected in the DiL export template, the process of compilation of the vehicle model into an app to use in rFpro is a simple process. The user can customize every aspect of the compiled app, from the target system to solver settings, build method and naming, result inclusions, code export, compiler settings and more.

Two tools, one solution

All of this means that through VeSyMA, Claytex can offer an effective unified solution, enabling engineers to be able to fully utilise the power of both the detailed, high fidelity offline vehicle simulation in Dymola and the complex, virtual test environments of rFpro in conjunction. Component oriented model re-use eliminates inefficient model duplication and unnecessary maintenance, enabling engineers to focus on the problem at hand.  For more information, please see the Claytex website. www.claytex.com

Mobility as a Service

Few people today buy CDs or DVDs anymore. It’s just much simpler to press a button and listen (or watch) what you want. Similarly, when the cost of mobility as a service becomes significantly less than the cost of using your own vehicle, we’ll see a dramatic shift in consumer attitudes towards vehicle ownership. Deloitte predicts that sometime between 2025 and 2030, there will be more vehicles in the US urban areas sold to ridesharing fleets than to private individuals.

Economic value creation

With this triple transformation, the economic value creation will transition from the business of selling cars to the business of offering mobility as a service. In fact, ARK Investments estimates that in 2030, the value of mobility as a service companies will be six times the value of auto manufacturers today. These future mobility service providers will benefit from triple disruption to create new revenue streams and consumer offerings.

Get started now

Ridesharing companies have clearly established the viability of on-demand rides worldwide. These companies have mastered the most expensive component of their cost structure: recruiting, on-boarding and managing drivers. With the addition of EV and autonomous technologies to on-demand ride services —the triple disruption—this expertise in driver management will greatly diminish as a competitive advantage. Expertise in managing fleets of vehicles themselves, rather than relying on drivers, will emerge as the great strategic differentiator for mobility as a service vendors.

To position themselves for the mobility as a service future, forward-thinking car manufacturers and other automotive operators are experimenting with carsharing services today. Carsharing services are accelerating the learning curve for these companies as they refine their service offerings, demand pricing, vehicle positioning, and fleet management strategies. This hard-won knowledge will build strong brand and operational differentiation as autonomous EVs become the dominant mode of urban transportation worldwide.

How Ridecell helps

Ridecell offers automotive companies a ready-built, proven software platform to manage ridesharing or carsharing services today. By eliminating the time and cost to build and test their own software platform and user app, Ridecell enables mobility vendors to launch their unique branded carsharing, ridesharing, or combined services within months, speeding the acquisition of critical strategic knowledge in physical fleet operations management, demand pricing, user relationships, alliance building, and vehicle maintenance.

By helping companies build their own brands and operational expertise, Ridecell offers its customers a strategic advantage as they prepare for the coming triple disruption of the transportation industry.

While a world of opportunities is what draws so many of us to live there, population growth is also becoming a burden. Congested roads, time wasted on commutes, polluted air and lack of green spaces limit the quality of life we seek. We spend way too much time crossing roads, walking between rows of parked cars, holding our breath and managing frustration in traffic. We are rapidly approaching a mobility tipping point. If left unaddressed, increased car usage will put a strain on the transport infrastructure such as roads, and the costs of maintaining a rusty old-fashioned public transport system will skyrocket. If we really want to scale the quality of life in our cities, lower the number of cars and conserve public assets, we need to offer a sustainable mobility alternative. To do that we need to start rethinking our economic approach and introduce some serious structural changes.

Current transport options are not intermodal or interoperable at even the basic level. In addition, public transport companies haven’t changed their modus operandi in centuries. Public transportation is, therefore, neither user-friendly nor seamless. Private companies rush to fill the gaps. City dwellers who travel private already benefit from a range of new digital services allowing them to share cars or hail rides using mobile apps. However, seen from a systematic point of view, private mobility offerings only exacerbate the situation. They might improve user experience, but in socio-economic terms, they really just mean ‘more of the same’. By simply enjoying new and better services we only end up increasing single car-usage even more and reducing the use of public transport services even further. In an interview with The Verge from February 2018 Yonah Freemark, an expert on public mobility who writes for The Transport Politic says that “if Uber were to begin operating bus routes, the biggest concern would be cannibalizing the most successful public transit routes, to leave the rest of the system poorly served”. Leaving citizens to disparate offerings would hamper social equality and not offer the birds-view perspective needed to build a holistic and seamless mobility system. In other words: we do need innovation - but we need to apply it in a universal and sustainable way.

Putting public transport in the driver’s seat of the mobility revolution

The relationship between economic growth and mobility is reciprocal. Higher economic growth leads to more cars, more traffic and more pollution. Exactly because mobility touches on so many aspects of our lives, a city simply can’t become sustainable without sustainable mobility. To ensure a sustainable mobility ecosystem, it is crucial that public transport providers are placed at its core. Public transport authorities have both the infrastructure to manage mass transportation and the long-term commitment to ensure public interest. Instead of following the free market forces, public transport companies follow regulation and have an obligation to serve all citizens. Sustainability not only stands for a balanced use of resources, it also means greater social inclusion. Only a mobility system which is accessible to everyone — regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnic background, age or gender can manage the movement of people across the city efficiently. Public transport providers can deliver that systematic and universal approach. Instead of disparate, competing offerings, there would be one seamless and intermodal mobility offering comprising the best travel options for every passenger.

The role of technology

The timing for public services to join the party could not be more ideal. The IDC study Data Age 2025 claims that the number of connected users will reach 75% of the world’s population by 2025. Hence, digitizing their services today public transport providers would encounter a tech-savvy society, fully equipped and educated to use digital tools. Imagine a public transport system comprised of fleets of autonomous shuttles — powered by clean energy, moving humans and goods, perfectly aligned with our daily lives. Equipped with artificial intelligence, shuttles are guided to where they’re needed and traffic can flow smoothly. The efficiency of data-driven mobility can further maximize the use of assets while minimizing the strain on infrastructure. For example, vehicles would only be used if they were actually needed and the pooling of passengers would reduce the number of vehicle trips and cars on the road.

As a first step, public transport authorities should apply digital technology to create a more customer-centric service that will increase its standing as a desirable alternative to the private car. They can start today by introducing a flexible on-demand mobility service - giving citizens a free choice of pick-up and drop-off locations, ensuring every individual request is addressed in a convenient way. In order for public transport companies to succeed in their digital transition, they require a technology partner who supports their goals. door2door’s technology enables cities all around the globe to implement new mobility solutions as part of the public transport system. By offering our technology and services we help cities and public transport authorities build an honest, equal and long-lasting mobility system, giving citizens back their living space, recreational areas and most importantly, making the air in cities breathable again.

To sum up: Mobility is essential to us and inseparable from the way we want to live. It is the foundation of both a successful economic system and a fulfilled private life. Through mobility, we gain access to goods and services and many business models and value chains rely on it. However, if we really want to address the tremendous challenges posed by a growing population on mobility and improve the quality of life for all inhabitants,we cannot simply address the problem with ‘more of the same’. Rather the goal should be to build a socially inclusive and sustainable mobility system able to mend  reduce the negative side effects of urbanization - such as social marginalization, congestion, the strain on public assets and air pollution . Because mobility touches on so many pressing issues, we need to build a public mobility system which is both desirable and accessible by everyone. In other words: wouldn’t we all love a a public mobility system that is available at our fingertips? One we would enjoy travelling with because of both its quality and availability? A public transport system can be as good as or better than any of the alternatives.  By equipping public transport with state-of-the-art technology, consumers will benefit from both innovation and regulation. We can exit the current self-destructive model by putting the public interest back in the front row and public transport back in charge. We can do so by using our technology to do good. Because “at its best, mobility enables prosperity and equality” (World Economic Forum white paper Designing a Seamless Integrated Mobility System, January 2018). And at their best, cities are the home to people, not cars.

It’s time to move safety forwards — together

Safety matters. Across the evolving autonomous vehicle industry, everyone is talking about safety and how to get it right. And no wonder — this transformative technology is in our sights, but the risks remain real and many problems remain unsolved. New transport technologies and services must improve citizens’ lives, not endanger them. The safety of self-driving vehicles must surpass human levels from the get-go, and continue to improve — fast.

Proving safety is also key to public acceptance. Without this acceptance, vehicles and services will not be adopted at the rate necessary for their many potential benefits to be unlocked. All this talk is vital and welcomed but, with the industry moving at such a swift pace, safety rhetoric must be matched with pragmatic, collective action.

Working closely with government, the industry needs to reach a new level of transparency. Regulators and businesses need to come together to agree on a framework that will drive high safety standards across the board, and guarantee ongoing safety innovation. Today, FiveAI publishes a landmark paper: ‘Certification of Highly Automated Vehicles for Use on UK Roads: Creating An Industry-Wide Framework for Safety’. We’ve united globally leading thinkers in the verification of complex autonomous systems and put together a set of insight and research-backed proposals and questions for industry and government, on the challenge of seeking and sharing verification evidence.

Our aim is to spark informed, collaborative decision making that quickly leads to the creation of regulation that 1. means self-driving innovation can thrive in the UK; 2. ensures the highest safety standards; 3. encourages all companies developing self-driving tech to share their safety findings via a best practice process that drives improvement, enhances safety for all citizens, and allows companies to protect their unique IP; and 4. takes meaningful steps towards greater transparency with the public.

Key principles, at a glance

The safety certification framework we outline will:

Ensure that commercially owned tech is verified independently and rigorously

What? The UK should create a market that allows for the independent, unbiased verification of complex autonomous systems that are owned by, and being developed by, commercial companies.

Why? Companies can’t be allowed to verify their systems on their own, unchecked. Verification of this revolutionary new tech calls for new, complex forms of simulation, drawing on techniques developed in the chip and aerospace industries. Many companies, particularly traditional automotive companies, do not have sufficient experience in this area.

How? We outline a framework based on a governing Certification Authority supported by independent test houses. The test houses control access to scenario test cases submitted by the industry. A publicly described test oracle determines whether a scenario test case has been passed or failed by the self-driving system, based on a safety threshold set by the Certification Authority.

Place transparent, hyper-scale and high-fidelity software simulation at the heart of the process

What? In an infinite real-world state space, simulation plays an important role as a tool for verification, helping developers to find and generate tricky scenario test cases and to complete faster-than-real-time test coverage. Currently, there isn’t a single, consistent, industry-wide approach to simulation and there is little public information about the parameters of the simulation models used by different developers.

Why? To ensure safety, the simulation environment must itself be validated. Greater transparency will allow the industry, regulators and the public to know that a given simulation is trustworthy and conducive to safety. For a simulation to be trustworthy, the simulator used must portray an appropriately accurate representation of reality. And the simulator needs to test the full stack self-driving system, not just the prediction, behaviour and control (‘motion planning’) aspects of the software. To do this requires a model of the vehicle’s sensor limitations and their ability to perceive the driving environment.

How? Government — through the Certification Authority — can play an important market-making role for the creation and licensing of simulation tools. It can do this either by ensuring that development expenses are capable of being leveraged into meaningful revenue streams by technology developers, or by sponsoring a cross-industry unit.

Create a means for companies to share their safety findings, with incentives to do so

What? Companies are rigorously testing self-driving vehicles. This involves actively looking for failures in their systems. When they discover a scenario test case in which their system fails, they can fix it. Through this process, complex autonomous systems become increasingly safe. Right now, there isn’t a smart, functioning way for companies to collaborate and share this data.

Why? Each business will discover its own unique set of challenging test cases. By sharing them across the wider industry, each company will have to demonstrate a safe self-driving system for its own most challenging scenario test cases and, crucially, for those of its competitors, too.

How? Enhanced safety will be fueled through competitive collaboration, as well as smart regulation. Scenarios can be discovered and submitted to a governing Certification Authority. Independent test houses would provide controlled access to validated scenarios so that multiple companies can test their own systems against these shared scenarios. To protect the IP and innovation spend of individual companies, the full details of the scenarios do not need to be shared — just the core details that enable safe, comprehensive testing for all.

Provide a set of road rules and driving codes and conventions to maximise safety

What? Driving standards and road rules exist to make our roads safer and encourage the free flow of traffic. But, in some cases, following rules in an overly rigid manner could reduce safety — rules need to be interpreted intelligently. To promote the safety of automated driving systems, autonomous vehicles must have the same options as human drivers. This implies much more than a simple digital map of road rules, but also some formalisation of the ‘exception handling’ rules that are implicit in common sense human behaviour.

Why? Moment by moment, human drivers exercise interpretation, discretion and common sense when applying standards and rules to real driving on real roads. For example, crossing a centre dividing line to avoid a lane obstruction, or judging how to behave if traffic lights are defective. These approaches and value judgements could be important for safety, but are not currently codified in a machine-readable way.

How? Devise and publish a Digital Highway Code.

A technical perspective

The paper brings together globally leading academics with diverse specialisms, uniting policy, technology and engineering. Professor John McDermid is Europe’s foremost authority on safety assurance of high-integrity systems, an advisor to FiveAI, and one of the paper’s contributors.

Reflecting on the paper, John commented:

“One of the motivating ideas behind autonomous driving is to make systems that are safer than humans. However, it’s unlikely the public would accept the uncertainty of this new tech unless it was significantly safer than a human.

The industry and government need to collaborate around a framework that will ensure the safety of autonomy. As well as the ability to share scenario test cases, this must also include arriving at an agreed format for the way in which data around autonomous decision making is stored and made available for analysis. It’s important that the industry engages regulators in these discussions.

Ultimately, by taking this collective action, public confidence will be improved, services can come to market faster and we can all experience the benefits this technology will bring.”

Next steps

This is no easy undertaking. Creating the right regulatory framework will be deeply complex — technologically, socially, politically, and commercially. The paper begins to address the intersection of engineering, business, politics and citizens’ everyday lives, but further discussion and decision making are needed.

FiveAI is committed to driving these conversations forward, through multiple projects and initiatives. As Europe’s leading autonomous vehicle company, it’s a duty we feel passionately about. Right now, we’re proud to be working closely with the UK Department for Transport for its public dialogue project on connected and automated vehicles, and to be working with the Law Commission on its review of the UK’s legal framework for automated vehicles. Further projects, initiatives and events are currently being planned.

With this new technology moving at such a fast pace and a transport revolution just around the corner, now’s the time to be taking practical action to ensure the safety of autonomous vehicles — for everyone.

Get the full paper at https://five.ai/certificationpaper

Vehicle Automation Levels – Source Society of American Engineers (SAE)

However, if you consider campus based high traffic destinations, where most roads are semi-controlled with a limited range of scenarios, the challenge becomes simpler and you only need a Level 4 vehicle. The autonomy becomes simpler still if the vehicle is operating in a non-public environment, such as airside at an airport. Therefore, my company Conigital is focusing on these high traffic destinations

The development of Conigital’s solutions is being funded by early commercial sales of the platform circa £1.2M and three Innovate UK projects and : Project CAPRI worth £5.7m, Project Synergy worth £4.7m and Project INSIGHT worth £2.2m. Each project includes a range of partners and clients including Manchester Airport, Birmingham Airport; Heathrow Airport and The Mall shopping Centre in Bristol. These projects all involve trials of different aspects of an on-demand last mile pod service.

Pod – Capri Project

As part of our funded projects, we are developing a fleet and asset management solution called ConOp. This allows us to manage and coordinate a fleet of autonomous vehicles, managing demand from passengers and instructing vehicles where to pick up passengers and where to drop them off. We are also working closely with Dynniq and Thingful to integrate traffic congestion and traffic signal data to ensure the most efficient data.

Although our projects are focused on autonomous pods, our system also caters for freight, service vehicles and existings fleets. We believe that these vehicles have as much or even more potential for automation than passenger vehicles.

ConOp is underlaid by ConOPTIUM, our patent pending Algorithm that enables a wider, systems of systems approach where we optimise transport fleets at high traffic destinations using a wide range of input parameters. We have taken this approach as we understand that high traffic destinations have a wide range of priorities that need consideration, whether it be energy use, costs, labour or customer satisfaction, as shown in the diagram below:

ConOPTIUM systems of systems approach

These inputs can be sourced as static data or as real time data, using API feeds from other systems. Depending on the inputs, the model can be run as a planning tool or as a dynamic, decision making tools.

For each client site we can vary preferences according to customer needs using a heuristic, multi-objective optimisation algorithm. For instance, at a budget airport we may prioritise cost and labour, whereas at a large Hub airport we might prioritise added value services and passenger services. Each scenario can model priorities for different parameters so client sites can determine whether there is a most effective solution for their needs or consider the impact of different trade-offs.

This algorithm is based on one created by the team that is successfully used in the airline industry to optimise aircraft movements and is the first time that it has been applied for surface transport. Our discussions with potential clients have shown that the optimiser is not just something that could apply to autonomous vehicles, there is demand for managing and coordinating existing vehicle fleets, especially during construction or for fleets that are only informally managed currently.

Another part of Conigital’s approach is the development of inclusive and accessible solutions. This approach is so strong that a Charity devoted to helping the Blind and Partially sighted has invested in us because they see the benefits that our technologies can offer to the people they support.

Within our projects we are developing a range of inclusive and accessible solutions under the ConApp umbrella:

The first is a patented 4d tactile map, this is like existing tactile maps as it provides a physical map of surroundings or the vehicle location but what is revolutionary is its ability for it to update and dynamically provide an accessible interface.

The second is a Mobility as a Service app which will allow autonomous vehicle hailing as well as integration with other transport modes. We are also exploring how indoor positioning systems can be integrated into this app to provide precise navigation to vehicles / stops. Primarily this is aimed at blind and partially sighted users, but we also see the benefit of making sure a customer reaches their exact vehicle, especially if there are multiple ones parked in a location.

The final product is the Gemma Virtual Concierge, which provides a tailored customer experience for users. By, talking to the app or device; Gemma will provide interactive access to travel advice, news and games, the internet and premium services at a destination, such as duty-free shopping and infotainment services.

All our ConApp products link to our ConOp Fleet and Asset Management system for seamless journeys but also provide to operators a source of anonymised demand and passenger information.

Connected and autonomous vehicles are soon to become part of our lives and the role of simulation in transportation planning, design, and engineering has never been more vital. In an arena with so many unknowns, simulation is perfectly suited to testing: it provides a safe, risk-free environment that is extensible and flexible enough to cope with changing parameters and a multitude of variables but that also has the power to analyze many scenarios in a matter of minutes.

There are two main perspectives on this: vehicle manufacturers want to use simulation as a debugging environment, to run virtual tests with software and hardware in the loop, to see how their products are going to perform in the network; public administrations want to test the impact of that technology and forecast the consequent changes and investments in mobility management. Both want to test these connected vehicle developments under different road traffic conditions, where there might be different proportions of CAVs in the national fleet and when connectivity becomes less reliable. All of these are hard to test on the road at present but can be tested in simulation.

Aimsun Next software provides a set of tools for investigation into the use of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) connectivity. The new, extensible V2X Software Development Kit (V2X SDK) can help researchers design innovative new systems based around connected vehicles and allow them to test future urban traffic management systems, in-car information tools, and autonomous vehicle controls.

The V2X SDK features the most common V2X message types defined in the EU or North America (protocols such as CAM - Cooperative Awareness Message; DENM – Decentralized Environmental Notification; and SPaT – Signal Phase and Timing) and allows the adjustment of transmission range and probability of successful transmission that simulates the physical and network layers of a Vehicle Ad-hoc Network (VANet). This makes it possible to test virtually any connected vehicle application, implementing the resulting actions at the level of a single vehicle, the immediate vicinity, or even network wide.

The V2X SDK is designed to be readily extended to add new technologies and messages as they emerge; an environment with the flexibility to work with vehicle behavior that ranges from detailed collaboration between connected and autonomous vehicles, to showing a driver information in the hope of eliciting a reaction. You only have to write some code for the On-Board Units (OBUs), for the Road Side Units (RSUs) and/or for the Traffic Management Centre (TMC) that, at every time step in the simulation, processes the list of messages received by each device, and defines the action to take (e.g. for an OBU set the speed of the vehicle, for an RSU change the duration of the current phase, for a TMC provide a route to an emergency vehicle).

The simulation also needs to operate at different scales. In one scenario, a modeler may want close-up detail for a single intersection, to test how fast driverless vehicles can pass through. Then, in another scenario, the modeler may want to test pollution levels using data aggregation across a large network.

Modeling at an appropriate scale, from a single junction to a city-wide road network, is an important part of what Aimsun Next is able to do with integrated macro, meso and micro models. The design of the V2X SDK in Aimsun Next, with its inherent extensibility and flexibility, is just a part of the same philosophy.

Efforts to fully coordinate these and maximise their joint potential have so far only been partially successful.  A bid for funding from the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth to fund and formalise such a coordination structure was unsuccessful in 2017.  However, there is a real appetite on behalf of some of the test beds and of ITS Sweden to create a framework for closer collaboration and they continue to work towards achieving this.  They would like to create a “package” of services to help market Swedish test sites and services to potential customers abroad. 

Conclusion

Two things stand out about the Swedish government’s approach to its ITS Strategy and Action Plan.  The first is that while it is an entirely Swedish process containing a large number of local public, private and academic interests, it is very much inspired, influenced and supported by EU research, regulation and participation.  It seems unlikely that it would exist in anything near its current well established form without the EU’s ITS activities.

The second is how well accepted and integrated it is throughout the Swedish ITS sector.  This seems to be mainly due to the very collaborative way it was conceived, with public and private sector actors coming together in a very open and collaborative way.  Under the leadership of the Transport Administration, this culture has continued to be nurtured and there is no detectible discrimination between public and private sector interests when the Strategy is implemented and developed.  This is also true of the potential central / regional divide.  The Strategy working parties include regional as well as central government interests and there is no discernible discrimination here either.  If anything, the regions appreciate the fact that the Strategy provides a good argument for funding for ITS, both maintenance and upgrading of existing systems and the procurement of new ones.