Implications of Autonomous Vehicles for Airport Planning, Design, and Operations

Recent years have seen considerable progress in the development of autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles for use on streets and highways, as well as in more specialized environments, such as airports. Although autonomous vehicles have been operated in experimental trials, many of which are still in progress, they generally do so with a safety driver at the controls. In spite of this progress, it may be many years before fully automated vehicles are permitted to operate on public streets and highways without a safety driver present. Operation in controlled environments, such as airport airside areas or on fixed routes, may be authorized earlier. In spite of the current uncertainty on when such operations will be permitted, it seems inevitable that airports will need to address both the opportunities and challenges presented by fully autonomous vehicles within the foreseeable future, and most likely within the typical time frame of an airport master plan update or the anticipated life of airport terminal and landside infrastructure currently being planned or designed. This paper reviews the current state of development of autonomous vehicles and describes a number of proposed and experimental applications at airports. It also discusses the likely challenges that will be faced by airports as highly or completely automated vehicles become more widely available, as well as potential opportunities that such vehicles may present.