Living Lab as an Ecosystem for Development, Demonstration and Assessment of Autonomous Mobility Solutions

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles (AV) have the potential to disrupt the entire transport industry. AV may bring many opportunities as for example reduction of road accidents, less congestion on the roads, and a lower number of vehicles that are better utilized. Full AV also brings new social element as they enable mobility for all. In addition, the use of digital technologies in combination with AV introduces new business models in transportation, where the lines between car ownership, rental, and lease modes are more and more blurred. To explore the potential of AV in a smart city context, the AV Living Lab was created on the premises of BTC City in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2017. The AV Living lab was created to test and to learn about real-life solutions for implementation of AV. The underlying concept is BTC City as a Living lab innovation ecosystem, where the latest advanced technologies, business models, and services are tested with real users, real cars, on real roads over the real interactions in a cross-industry environment. In this paper, we describe the AV Living Lab concept and provide details of a specific use case-a large-scale pilot demonstration of AV and future mobility solutions. During the event, users participated in a survey and expressed their attitudes towards autonomous mobility. The results offer the first insights into the readiness of citizens for AV implementation and directs future actions needed for faster adoption of AV and future mobility solutions.Sustainability 2019, 11, 4095 2 of 21 AV by 2030. By the 2030, over 95% of new car sales are expected to be at least partially electrified and 55% fully electrified [15]. Automaker and technology giants are making huge investments in self-driving initiatives. AV have different levels of automation and there are multiple definitions for them. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) provides classification that defines five levels of automation. The cars are fully autonomous when they reach Level 5 (full automation) [16]. In Europe, vehicles are currently classified predominantly as Level 0 or Level 1, with only rare exceptions of Level 2 (Mercedes E-Class) and Level 3 (Audi A8). It is predicted that in 2030, the majority of vehicles will be classified as Level 2 and Level 4 [15].Despite fast technological development, which drives innovation in the field of AV, user acceptance of automated and autonomous mobility solutions will play a significant role in transportation transformation in the future. Several studies investigated different factors influencing user acceptance of AV from different perspectives [2,4,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. However, only a few studies have assessed the user perception of AV after the real life experiences [25,27]. Existing surveys [2,20,21,28] show positive attitudes towards AV. However, (potential) users have exposed also different concerns, primarily related to safety, cybersecurity and availability (high costs).Self-driving cars are considered as disruptive innovation and as such fit the idea of Schu...

The determinants of acceptability and behavioural intention of automated vehicles – a review

“…There are two ways to measure intention to use: intention to use for some use-cases or for a shared or owned vehicle, or general intention to use. When participants are asked to evaluate different use cases, they tend to approve of all of them Ledger et al, 2018;Leicht et al, 2018;Nielsen & Haustein, 2018;Nishihori et al, 2017;Nordhoff et al, 2019;Pucihar et al, 2019;Rahman et al, 2019;Regan et al, 2017;Rehrl & Zankl, 2018), except driving children without an adult present (Kaur & Rampersad, 2018;Ledger et al, 2018;Lee & Mirman, 2018;Lustgarten & Le Vine, 2018;Regan et al, 2017). This result is similar in studies that provide no information, only a brief definition or that include AV experience.…”

“…The results also showed that trust may vary depending on the reliability. Trust was higher when the AV was reliable than when it performed poorly (Pucihar et al, 2019;Rovira et al, 2019). Trust was thus negatively affected by perceived risks (Choi & Ji, 2015;Rovira et al, 2019).…”

“…However, studies based on a brief definition of the AV, as well as those involving real experience, seem to show that users tend to stick with the way they use their car today. The user always saw him/herself in the driver's seat (Zmud & Sener, 2017) and his/her preferred activities were those that everyone already does in their vehicle: admiring the landscape and interacting with the other occupants of the vehicle (Ledger et al, 2018), in particular children (Lee & Mirman, 2018), or listening to music (Pucihar et al, 2019). For shuttle trips, riders do not believe that the trips will allow them to engage in cognitively demanding tasks, due to the lack of isolation (Nordhoff et al, 2019).…”

Systematic Literature Review on Smart Mobility: A Framework for Future “Quantitative” Developments

“…According to the literature, numerous studies aim to identify innovative solutions for the improvement of traffic mobility from different points of view. Reference is made, for example, to the study on on-demand mobility services (Faisal et al 2019; Freudendal-Pedersen, Kesselring, and Servou 2019; Marletto 2019; Pucihar et al 2019), to the development of systems that can integrate connected vehicle data and traffic sensor information (Yang et al 2019), and to the use of high-definition smart cameras with wireless communication (Ho et al 2019) to simultaneously address the need to improve the safety and mobility of urban arteries. These systems aim to reduce the potential accident rate, monitor traffic, and calculate the length of the queues at intersections as a function of time to improve arterial progression.…”

The Living Lab as a Tool to Promote Residents’ Participation in Destination Governance

“…One example that discusses residents' participation in a tourism context will be cited here. Pucihar et al (2019) stress tourists as a source of innovation and a target group-oriented approach: Through living labs, "tourist service providers will obtain insight into what tourists actually want and will have an opportunity to improve and develop new services targeted to different customer segments" [152]. By expanding this user-centric approach, the ideal LL is probably a user-driven LL, which is fully based on self-governance.…”