Speaker
Description
The weather has wide-ranging impact on many aspects of transport, in terms of both efficiency and safety. As transport systems become more automated and more connected, there is a growing necessity for weather impacts to be assessed and managed by vehicles and the infrastructure they use. For example, a vehicle’s Automated Driving System (ADS) must be able to accurately determine whether or not the vehicle can operate competently in the environment around it. This concept is captured by the Operational Design Domain (ODD), in which the functional limitations of an automated driving system are defined in terms of the environment, geography and infrastructure around a vehicle.
In conventional vehicles, assessment and mitigation of weather impacts on the vehicle and driver is done by human judgment as part of the driving task. In making such judgments, a driver implicitly draws on multiple sources of information, including how the weather looks, the context to interpret how it looks (e.g. discerning road glare from ice), what to expect ahead (e.g. weather warnings and seasonal hazards) and how to adapt when driving (e.g. slow down in reduced visibility). The safest and most efficient ADS will be able to assimilate a similarly disparate set of evidence – crucially, accounting for associated uncertainties – and intelligently adapt to changeable weather so as to mitigate impacts. The same principle extends to fleet and infrastructure management (e.g. highway traffic control). The complex and dynamic nature of the weather and its impacts offers abundant applications for artificial intelligence (AI).
In this presentation, we share insights gained through Met Office work with the Future of Mobility sector over the past two years and outline the role of AI in implementing concepts such as the ODD to guide better decision making for safety and efficiency in automated transport systems. The meteorological community has a pivotal, enabling role to play in the mobility revolution, and stands to benefit from a new era of connected sensing platforms. We discuss approaches to identifying key challenges and opportunities through transport sector engagement.
