Anagrafe della ricerca

The project is intended to analyze, develop and validate approaches, methodological tools and procedures to test cooperative, connected and autonomous mobility (CCAM). The twofold aim is to achieve an advancement of scientific and technological knowledge, and to create a methodological support for national and international operators and structures that will deal with technical standards and guidelines for CCAM. The reference framework is the testing of vehicles in realistic and complex traffic scenarios, in conditions modified by the disappearance of the driver as an intermediary between the vehicle and the traffic context, who now directly manages the functions of the vehicle, and determines a different behaviour with respect to both individual safety and traffic flow. The testing also involves the ability of new solutions to have non-disruptive effects on traffic and to enable efficient mobility services that respect the objectives of sustainability and neutrality toward climate-altering effects. The project methodologically enables more general aspects of standardization / homologation, while leaving them to the national and European regulatory bodies, and therefore supports not only scientific and technological knowledge, but also public debate, institutional involvement and technical-regulatory culture. The complexity of CCAM environments and the poor deterministic predictability of the traffic flow conditions in which the automation operates determine the need for many hours and kilometers of testing, which results in the necessity of implementing a major part of it in virtual simulation environments, with low cost and fast-time approaches. The methodologies will therefore include both modelling and simulation systems, that together guarantee the plausibility of the testing in two directions: from the context to the vehicle (realistic and representative stimuli of a wide range of situations); from the vehicle to the context (stress and realistic impacts on networks and services). The project will therefore develop the integration of methodological tools for the creation and validation of testing scenarios (and for the design of the resulting experiments), for the co-simulation of complex environments, including traffic and infrastructural scenarios, for the characterization and the evaluation of the performance of the tested vehicles/components. Methodological procedures and tools will be supported by vehicle simulators and driving simulators, as well as simulators of vehicular traffic networks. To develop the methodological framework, large experimental facilities will be exploited; the value of these available assets is a few million euros. At the end of the project, in addition to scientific advances and the innovation of methods and tools, a network of highly competent laboratories in the CCAM field will have been consolidated, able to compete and integrate in the European and global panorama.