Connected Autonomous People Mover Case Study

One of the main goals of Singapore’s Land Transport Master Plan 2040 is to facilitate 20-minute towns and 45-minute cities. A key component in achieving a more efficient public transport system is autonomous on-demand services, particularly autonomous people movers.

Though these systems are proven to be efficient when utilised on dedicated tracks, the challenge with autonomous people mover services is to achieve a high capacity in mixed traffic. To do this, schemes like priority lanes, interactive traffic lights and optimised dispatch are required to remove unnecessary stops, while infrastructure augmented safety and C-V2X with other traffic will facilitate higher operational speeds while maintaining required safety levels. Both cellular and DSRC based V2X networks are key to making these technologies work.

Although various demonstrations of V2X technologies in combination with autonomous and connected vehicles have been done, most of them are between proprietary devices from the same company, and if security is implemented, this involves security certificates issue by the operator of fixed infrastructure.

This project proposes various technologies which enable open architectures and security to achieve trusted V2X communication. However, the communication needs to be validated in a system level people mover application to achieve its objectives while meeting performance requirements.

WP7 will deliver a vehicle level architecture deploying the open DSRC+Cellular hybrid platform.

While there are numerous demonstrations of V2X technology with connected and autonomous vehicles, none have demonstrated the use of multiple sources, as enabled by WP8 DSRC+Cellular hybrid networks, or demonstrated security management in combination with safety critical functions and proven that communication and security processing can be done with sufficient effectiveness to enable infrastructure augmented safety and higher safe operating speeds of autonomous people movers.

To demonstrate the operational capabilities of V2X technologies developed in this programme, WP7 targets to meet the following objectives:

1. Study the benefits of V2X on Autonomous People Movers, which are of high interest to Singapore Land Transport development plans.
2. Use cases such as green waves, bus priority, emergency vehicle hurry call, interaction with large-sized vehicles, and infrastructure augmented safety will be investigated. In all cases, network reliability, network performance and security management will be carefully evaluated.
3. Another important aspect of the case studies concerns the limitations of real-time control across large scale networks, and the appropriate scale for reliable V2X solutions.

 The expected outcome of the project is as follows:

1. Use case report on benefits of V2X to capacity of automated people mover system.
2. Report on V2X based application system level performance required to ensure capacity improvements, especially for safety critical functionality relating to the correct functioning of infrastructure augmented safety and safety critical information received through C-V2X from other traffic.
3. Application level architecture of open DSRC+Cellular implementation in autonomous vehicles.
4. DSRC+Cellular V2X latency verification in autonomous vehicle applications.
5. Input to the Singapore Technical Reference for Autonomous Vehicles TR-68 working groups on requirements for implementing infrastructure augmented safety.

Eventually, this project aims to bring about an open hybrid DSRC+Cellular V2X reference implementation for autonomous people movers for research organisations, government agencies and industry partners to test out their new algorithm, prototype, or solutions.