Decision-Making Process for (National) Road Authorities to Invest in Information Support for Automated Driving Systems

Abstract Current Automated Driving Systems (ADS) immaturity causes a lot of uncertainty for road authorities as they cannot decide with confidence what is the best way to anticipate ADS development and deployment to preserve operational safety and efficiency on their road network. Typically, the actual competencies of ADS in the operating environment are not entirely known and ADS capabilities are regularly overestimated or underestimated based on assumptions that are derived from the scarce information that is publicly available. At the same time, many different situations can occur on open roads and in variable traffic and weather conditions, in particular when these roads are dynamically managed by the road operator (e.g. lane, speed and tunnel management). It is natural that National Road Authorities (NRAs) are concerned about the introduction of ADS that execute the complete dynamic driving task. The most constructive and perhaps only way forward is to create a dialogue between road authorities, automation system developers and regulators. The decision making process presented in this paper aims to support NRAs in this conversation.