The fast developments of automated vehicles (AV) on the technological front are promising to deliver many advantages with regards to transport efficiency, fuel economy, and traffic capacity. However, these advantages might be mitigated by challenges especially when it comes to safety. Therefore, remote assistance of automated vehicles may be needed as driving conditions are not always predictable with many situations that may need supervision. Therefore, the importance of a traffic control tower rises to aid the development of automated vehicles and provide safety in unpredictable conditions. Such a control tower will be used for control and operation on vehicle, fleet and traffic levels, which all will be affected by the introduction an automated and driverless vehicles. The goal of the project is to understand the role of a traffic control tower (TCT) for automated road vehicles (AVs). In order to understand the role of the traffic control tower the project aimed at performing a pre-study and build a prototype of control tower in order to understand the functionalities and roles of the control tower as well as the possibilities of design and layouts. First, the pre-study aspect of the traffic control tower project consists of two main activities. The first activity included multiple workshops that were organized by KTH ITRL. In these workshops, the project partners as well as reference group actors have participated in to increase the knowledge on the control tower role in the different use cases that they traffic control tower may play an important role in. Second, the project aimed also at building an integrated prototype to demonstrate the potential design and use of a traffic control tower in teleoperation. The report addresses the results of the project on different fronts of the traffic control tower with regards to state-of-the-art, workshops, research questions, prototype development and integration, conclusions future research and the participating partners.

Drive Sweden: projekt AVTCT