Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic Conditions—A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) with their immaculate sensing and navigating capabilities are expected to revolutionize urban mobility. Despite the expected benefits, this emerging technology has certain implications pertaining to their deployment in mixed traffic streams, owing to different driving logics than Human-driven Vehicles (HVs). Many researchers have been working to devise a sustainable urban transport system by considering the operational and safety aspects of mixed traffic during the transition phase. However, limited scholarly attention has been devoted to mapping an overview of this research area. This paper attempts to map the state of the art of scientific production about autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic conditions, using a bibliometric analysis of 374 documents extracted from the Scopus database from 1999 to 2021. The VOSviewer 1.1.18 and Biblioshiny 3.1 software were used to demonstrate the progress status of the publications concerned. The analysis revealed that the number of publications has continuously increased during the last five years. The text analysis showed that the author keywords “autonomous vehicles” and “mixed traffic” dominated the other author keywords because of their frequent occurrence. From thematic analysis, three research stages associated with AVs were identified; pre-development (1999–2017), development (2017–2020) and deployment (2021). The study highlighted the potential research areas, such as involvement of autonomous vehicles in transportation planning, interaction between autonomous vehicles and human driven vehicles, traffic and energy efficiencies associated with automated driving, penetration rates for autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic scenarios, and safe and efficient operation of autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic environment. Additionally, discussion on the three key aspects was conducted, including the impacts of AVs, their driving characteristics and strategies for their successful deployment in context of mixed traffic. This paper provides ample future directions to the people willing to work in this area of autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic conditions. The study also revealed current trends as well as potential future hotspots in the area of autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic.

Guiding Urban Decision-Making: A Study on Recommender Systems in Smart Cities

“…Since the authors' main desire was to provide a bibliometric analysis as accurate as possible, presented in an objective manner, apart from the specified advantages associated with Biblioshiny that were previously mentioned in the second chapter, it should also be considered that this tool is designed to work with only one database and, unfortunately, the use of more databases was not possible in this case. For us, this was not thought of as a limitation, since we had already decided to use a single database approach, as in other similar studies [85,86], but this aspect should be taken into consideration by future researchers who want to extend this study further.…”

Cybersecurity in Internet of Medical Vehicles: State-of-the-Art Analysis, Research Challenges and Future Perspectives

“…But integrating the IOT has many constraints and challenges because there are many new and untapped research areas in this sector. In [55], the authors describe the analysis of a literature study explaining the interaction between AVs and manually driven vehicles, as well as the safe and efficient operation of AVs. The authors illustrate AVs with their challenges in sustainable urban mobility, like security vulnerabilities and privacy [56].…”

Exploring the Landscape of Autonomous Vehicles Research: A Scientometric Analysis in the Context of Urban Transportation Planning

“…Employing bibliometric analysis of 374 documents belong to 1999-2021 time-span, Azam et al [27] mapped the scientific production of AVs in mixed traffic conditions. Shams Esfandabadi et al [28] conducted a systematic bibliometric analysis using 729 peer-reviewed journal articles in the carsharing research field, considering both the conventional carsharing and the impact of AVs on the field.…”