Beyond Basics: Can a Driving Simulator Reliably Reproduce Real Vehicle Dynamics?

Despite constant technological innovation, road transport remains a significant source of pollutant emissions, and effective driver-behaviour changes can be considered as solutions that can increase the sustainability of road traffic in a short period. Thus, understanding driver behaviour plays a key role in assessing traffic-related impacts. Since real-world experiments entail some risks and are often not flexible, simulator-based experiments can be relevant to studying vehicle dynamics and driver behaviour.

How can the built environment affect the impact of autonomous vehicles' operational behaviour on air quality?

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are pointed out as the technology that will reshape the concept of mobility, with significant implications for the economy, the environment, and society. This fact will bring new challenge to cities urban planning. Research to anticipate the AVs impacts, maximizing their benefits and reduce trade-offs are currently crucial.

Autonomous vehicles opportunities for cities air quality.

The impacts of autonomous vehicles (AV) on safety, energy and atmospheric emissions have been recognised to be important issues, but an air quality impact assessment is missing. In this study, by using a numerical modelling approach, the impact of AV on the air quality of a medium-sized Portuguese urban area was evaluated. For that, the air pollutants nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon dioxide (CO) were considered and three scenarios were developed: i) a baseline scenario; ii) an autonomous scenario, assuming an AV market penetration rate of 30%; and iii) an electric autonomous scenario, taking into account that those 30% of AV are pure battery electric cars.

Assessment of potential improvements on regional air quality modelling related with implementation of a detailed methodology for traffic emission estimation.

The accuracy and precision of air quality models are usually associated with the emission inventories. Thus, in order to assess if there are any improvements on air quality regional simulations using detailed methodology of road traffic emission estimation, a regional air quality modelling system was applied. For this purpose, a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches was used to build an emission inventory.

Impact of land use on urban mobility patterns, emissions and air quality in a Portuguese medium-sized city.

The main objective of this work was to evaluate the impact of urban development trends in mobility patterns of a medium sized Portuguese city and air quality consequences, using a sequential modeling process, comprising i) land use and transportation, TRANUS model; ii) road traffic air pollutants emissions, TREM model and; iii) air quality, TAPM model. This integrated methodology was applied to a medium sized Portuguese city. In order to evaluate the implementation of the methodology, a preliminary study was performed, which consisted on the comparison of modeled mobility patterns and CO and PM(10) concentrations with measured data used in the definition of the current scenario.