Potential Influences on Long-Term Service Performance of Road Infrastructure by Automated Vehicles

Automated vehicles (AVs) have received great attention in recent years, and an automated road transportation sector may become reality in the next decades. Many benefits of AVs have been optimistically predicted, although some benefits may be overestimated because of a lack of thinking from a holistic point of view. From a future perspective, this study investigated the potential consequences to the long-term service performance of practical physical road infrastructure after the advent of the implementation of AVs on a large scale. Specifically, the pavement rutting performance by the possibly changed behaviors, such as the vehicle’s wheel wander, lane capacity, and traffic speed, was examined carefully with the finite element modeling approach. With the use of AVs, the decreased wheel wander and increased lane capacity could bring an accelerated rutting potential, but the increase in traffic speed would negate this effect, which was shown by the simulation results of rut depth. Therefore the influence cannot be judged as positive or negative in general; judgment actually depends much on the practical road and traffic conditions. In the future the physical roads not only might serve for the mobility of the vehicles but also might be capable of enabling other new functions. An early consideration of how to lead the future development of physical road infrastructure toward multifunctionality is emphasized.