Research Publications

This report assesses the opportunities within Ann Arbor for the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles (AV) and provides recommendations on which AV systems can potentially enhance sustainability of personal transportation. Throughout the course of this research, we assume automated driving capabilities have met both technical and legal requirements to ensure safe and effective fully self-driving operation on public roads (NHTSA level 4, SAE level 5). We develop a multi-disciplinary research framework to understand the broader impacts of AV systems across various dimensions. This approach involves determining the travel demand for a proposed service based on trip behavior via existing modes, designing and optimizing an AV fleet according to the service’s demand profile and drive cycle, and evaluating the AV system, and its competing modes, across a set of sustainability and system performance metrics.