Sharing Mobility: Lane Accommodation in Urban Road Networks with Automated Vehicles

This paper deals with the lane accommodation problem for road networks with Automated Vehicles (AVs), Up to now, this problem has been studied for extra-urban networks, while this study investigates the more complex urban case. It aims at contributing to the definition of sharing mobility scenarios based on the use of AVs and restrictions to the use of Conventional Vehicles (CVs) for our future cities. This paper recalls the problem of lane accommodation for AVs and presents a procedure to define a subnetwork with AV reserved lanes, which is specified by using a what-if approach. In the view of strategic planning applied to large and complex network as urban ones, and of speeding up the problem solution, such a procedure uses a commercial macro-simulation model. The model is properly specified to capture the main aspects of the presence of both AVs and CVs and AV dedicated lanes. First results of a test case application are reported to show the capability of the proposed approach.