Co-Benefits and Tradeoffs Between Safety, Mobility, and Environmental Impacts for Connected and Automated Vehicles

A large number of Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) applications are being designed, developed, and deployed in order to greatly improve our transportation systems in terms of safety, mobility, and reducing environmental impacts. These benefits can be quantified by a variety of performance measures that are often cited in the literature. However, most of these CAV applications are typically designed to improve transportation systems only in a particular dimension, usually focusing on either safety, mobility, or the environment. Very few research papers have considered a wider range or combination of performance measures across multiple dimensions, examining potential co-benefits or tradeoffs between these measures. For example, you can design a CAV application that greatly improves safety, but it might come at the cost of reducing traffic throughput. Further, the design of the CAV applications is often static and limited to specific traffic scenarios and conditions. CAVs that can adapt to different conditions, and be “tunable” for different societal needs will have much greater impact and versatility. In this presentation, we examine various co-benefits and tradeoffs of current CAV applications and consider how we can design these systems to have greater flexibility when it comes to deployment. We cite not only different CAV applications evaluated in simulation, but also real-world CAV deployments that operate on various testbeds, such as the Innovation Corridor located in Riverside, California. Based on this analysis, we can consider several new research directions for future CAV deployments.