In a world of ever-increasing population, managing infrastructure smartly is a very challenging task for many transportation agencies around the world, and more importantly managing the way people adopt innovative transportation modes such as on-demand transportation, ridesharing services, etc.

Due to an increasing demand of fast, safe and reliable travel journeys, connected and autonomous have known and increasing popularity in the last 5 years a nd various research organisation, industrial companies around the world are investing their efforts for a new big travelling shift from traditional cars to autonomous and on-demand vehicles without individual owners.

But various challenges are impeding a fast adoption of such modes, such as:

• lack of advanced road infrastructure to support a fast and efficient V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) and V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) communication. The ability for new autonomous cars to communicate between them but also with current traffic lights or roadside units is extremely important to re-evaluate their position, send and receive early collision alarms which would help prevent traffic incidents and inform traffic management centers of ongoing traffic anomalies
• lack of standard adoption, insurance policies, safety regulations in various countries around the world.
• lack of design thinking of the CV/AV adoption under the overview of a whole eco-system which should include various entities responsible with: production/ testing/ compliance checking/ software upgrade/ data collection and transmission/vehicle maintenance/placement of recharging hubs/repairing and replacement of damaged vehicles/ real-time traffic congestion awareness and updated urban maps/ etc.
• lack of research studies which would evaluate various aspects of the CV/AV adoption.
• lack of regulatory bodies for dealing with data privacy, security breaches and safety compliance.

In order to address these challenges, researchers from the Future Transport Mobility group in UTS have partnered with Fortescue Metals Group and their Future of Mobility Centre to create the world’s first autonomous vehicles fleet operating in real life conditions in the city of Karratha, Australia. The work will explore all aspects of future mobility from software development, hardware installation and adoption of autonomous driving modes, to various forms of mobility solutions.

The researchers in UTS will we working side by side to evaluate the impact of Autonomous and connected vehicles from various aspects: evaluating people’s behaviour and receptiveness with regards to adopting a new transport mode, testing various AV vehicles and evaluating them under real road traffic conditions, modelling and simulating the impact of AVs on the road network, optimising the road infrastructure and choosing the right equipment, and finally but not least, putting together a framework for transferring the learning steps for future cities equipment.

This work aligns with the UTS 2027 initiative for building “a sustainable future” for the present and future generations and the planet, using people, processes and systems. By bringing our machine learning, transport modelling and behavioural expertise we are bringing data science in the core of new technological adoption and help transition towards a sustainable planet, with less pollution, safer trips and improved congestion.