Safety evaluation on automatically operation bus system by its technologies

In Japan, several new transportation systems for urban areas are being developed and partly starting revenue services. These systems make use of new technologies, for example, linear motors, air cushion or magnetic levitation. From these trends, a new transportation system using ITS (intelligent transportation systems) technologies is being developed by Toyota. This system is developed not only under the basis of bus technology but new technologies, for example, radio control, automatic steering and noncontacting crossing are applied for realizing automatic platoon running between several vehicles (maximum 6 vehicles). This paper describes the trend of new urban transportation systems in Japan and safety evaluation method on these systems. After this, as the example of these evaluations, the automatic operation bus system developing by Toyota is chosen. This system is described and some safety evaluation results checked by this "safety evaluation committee on this system" are referred. Moreover, hazard analyses executed by FTA (fault tolerance analysis) method and some running test decided by these analyses and a part of its' evaluation results are shown.