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Abstract

In the course of developing automated vehicle-roadway systems, opportunities to deploy vehicle control systems at intermediate stages of development may emerge. Some of these systems may provide a significant efficiency or safety enhancement to existing operations with manually-driven vehicles. Under certain circumstances, transit buses provide an ideal testbed for such systems. The work presented here represents a feasibility study for the application of Advanced Vehicle Control Systems (AVCS) to transit bus operations. The paper explores past and present research relevant to automatic control for buses and describes specific operations that could be better performed by AVCS-assisted or controlled vehicles. The study concludes with a series of recommendations for proceeding toward a deployment phase. For transit bus operations, the most suitable deployment opportunities for AVCS exist on exclusive busways (bus-only roads) or large bus servicing facilities used for daily maintenance operations. Busways would provide an excellent testing ground for a lateral control/lane keeping system. Such a system would provide immediate utility on the existing busway and would serve as a building block for more highly automated systems in the future. Maintenance operations in service garages require dedicated drivers to move vehicles through a routine servicing sequence. By fully automating the movement of buses within such facilities, labor costs could be dramatically reduced.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5038/2375-0901.1.3.3

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