Final Report

The 2020 CEDR Research Call on the Impact of CAD on Safe Smart Roads had as its aim to “prepare the national road authorities on future challenges of connectivity, digitalization and automation to get to an autonomously well-managed traffic flow.” CEDR cautioned that “ If NRAs do not act proactively, the vehicle manufacturers will determine the automation of traffic flow alone, the NRAs will fall behind and huge investment will be needed to safeguard NRAs’ objectives. NRAs’ goals and roles in the Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility of the future must be clear…NRAs need to determine and act before other parties decide in our place where we need to invest.”. The Digital Road for Evolving Connected and Automated Driving (DiREC) project set out to develop a toolkit for NRAs to use in their assessment and development of their capabilities as digital road operators. This toolkit, referred to as the CAV Readiness Framework (CRF), focuses on five key areasof provision that are central to the development of connected and automated driving capabilities. Those areas being: Physical infrastructure Digital infrastructure Communications infrastructure Standards and regulation Operational support DiREC focused on technologies, services and regulatory infrastructure for which NRAs might either have direct responsibility or at least significant influence. Development led by vehicle manufacturers or the regulations governing them were considered to be outside the scope of influence of the NRAs, for the moment at least. Instead, attention was given to those technologies and services that are likely to be generically useful to most or all future CAD solutions. We identified that there is still a considerable diversity of approaches amongst the developers of automated vehicles, with no single technical strategy yet close to being dominant.
Research funding provided by Conference of European Directors of Roads (CEDR).
Digital Road for Evolving Connected and Automated Driving (DiREC)