A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Transportation and Future Mobility".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 March 2022.

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Special Issue Editor
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Prof. Dr. Dimitri Konstantas E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Geneva School of Economics and Management/Information Science Institute, Universite de Geneve, 1205 Geneve, Switzerland
Interests: autonomous vehicles; information security; mobile applications

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Special Issue Information
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Dear Colleagues,

The dream of autonomous driving is as old as the invention of cars. In the last few years, this dream has begun to slowly become a reality, with companies investing massively in automated and autonomous driving all around the world. Although the much-advertised large investment developments target private or taxi-like cars, it seems that the most probable large-scale deployment will come from public transportation autonomous vehicle services. The reasons for this are many, including the by definition geo-fenced service areas, zero cost to citizens, great potentials for green deployments, great potential for large cost savings, and relatively low-speed operation.

Autonomous vehicles in public transportation have the potential to revolutionize the way that citizens commute in urban and suburban environments, making fixed itineraries and predefined bus stops obsolete. Autonomous vehicles for public transportation will be deployed to their full potential, where they will operate in a highly personalized mode, picking up passengers in front of their house, like a taxi, but with the price and service of good old public transportation models, offering on-demand, door-to-door shared public transportation services.

However, passengers who are familiar with today’s public transportations have high service expectations, ranging from predictable timing of commuting to simplicity in ticketing and boarding, and from services for special needs passengers to safety onboard. We thus need to develop not just vehicles, but also a complete ecosystem of passenger and public transport operator services that improves the passenger experience.

The target of this Special Issue is to identify what the technologies and services are that can make autonomous vehicles the prime choice for public transportation services in urban and suburban environments.

The topics for this call include but are not limited to:

1. Technology issues (state of AI, state of AV driver, and road behavior);
2. Technologies for regulatory compliance;
3. Services and requirements;
4. Autonomous vehicles’ IT security;
5. Safety of AVs;
6. Integration in urban public transport: ticketing, MaaS, smart city needs, PTO IT integration.

Prof. Dr. Dimitri Konstantas
Guest Editor