Oikonomou M., Sekadakis M., Katrakazas C., Goñib A., Lattarulob R., Yannis G., “Impacts of automated driving vehicles on bus depot operation using naturalistic data”, Proceedings of the 11th International Congress on Transportation Research (Heraklion, Greece, 20-22 September 2023)

The EU SHOW project is conducting real-life demonstrations across 20 European cities to investigate the integration of Automated Driving (AD) vehicles into various schemes. One such demonstration site is the Madrid site, which concerns bus depot operations. The present study aims to support this real AD vehicles implementation by applying the microsimulation method in order to investigate their impacts that could not be measured in reality. Specifically, four scenarios were simulated: three involving three different AD vehicle operations and a baseline scenario without the AD vehicles. Results showed that AD vehicles led to increased bus depot delays and travel times, and decreased speed, since they keep lower speed than the human-driven vehicles that coexist in the depot. This simulation approach enables the assessment of potential alternatives before real-life interventions, guiding stakeholders and practitioners to prioritize essential aspects for future conditions, specifically AD vehicle operations.