Authors: Camila Correa-Jullian, Anna Cosmin-Spanoche, Sam Fuller, Xin Xia, Ali Mosleh, Mollie D’Agostino, and Jiaqi Ma.

About

This presentation will report on ongoing research that seeks to address questions surrounding safety drivers and remote operators in heavy-duty automated vehicles (HD-AVs) from two different perspectives: a risk-informed analysis of human-system safety and the development of a labor policy framework.

The UCLA team is leading on safety, using a risk-informed approach to investigate human-system interactions in HD-AV operations. This research is a continuation of research sponsored by NHTSA, and UCLA. The presentation will expand on how this research is characterize risks associated with safety drivers, teleoperators, or the lack thereof. This research identifies the limits of human supervision and intervention, and what operational conditions can lead to safer or more hazardous operations. Risk assessment frameworks will be employed to provide recommendations for risk reduction, as well as the derivation of human-system interaction metrics to inform policy decisions.

The UC Davis team will report preliminary findings from a series of interviews with experts in law, labor policy, and freight automation. These findings complement a review of relevant literature. The interviews and review focus on key differences for workers using both ADAS and ADS technology, also teasing out the different experiences of middle-mile operations, drayage operations, urban delivery, etc. While findings are still preliminary, the next step in this research is to develop a comprehensive policy framework assessing tradeoffs for HD-AV development with the state’s goals of enhancing safety, improving worker well-being, and generating economic benefits.

Presentation slides can be found here: PPTXARTS24-105-HelpWanted_CorreaJullian