Dr. Stanley E. Young is an Advanced Transportation and Urban Scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) – a Department of Energy research and devilment center in Golden, CO. Beginning his employment for NREL in 2015, he currently serves as the NREL lead for the Mobility Innovations & Equity Team, where he oversees multiple research endeavors by an advanced research group of scientists and urban scientists. Over the past 5 years, he has personally led the research team that studies the advancement of automated/autonomous vehicle technology as an essential platform for implementing “automated mobility districts” in dense urban settings. This has resulted in his coauthoring of numerous publications in this field, including peer-reviewed technical papers published in conference proceedings and NREL published research reports. Currently, his team is investigating the implications of this transportation automation technology on the simultaneous development of the electrification of the associated vehicle fleets. As an essential aspect of this technology evolution needed to implement automated mobility districts, he is also personally leading related research into advanced sensing and AI based technology applications for infrastructure perception and control of traffic operations. Both of these aspects are discussed in the 2022 NREL report titled The Automated Mobility District Implementation Catalog, 2nd Edition – Safe and Efficient Automated Vehicle Fleet Operations for Public Mobility.
Dr. Young is also currently serving as the Chief Data Officer for The Eastern Transportation Coalition as a Dual Appointment since 2021 under the auspices of the University of Maryland.
Dr. Young worked for a number of years (1994-2006) in the field of intelligent transportation systems technology as an employee of the Kansas Department of Transportation. During that time he also received his Doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Kansas (2004). Subsequently, he accepted a position as a member of the Associate Research Faculty in the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the University of Maryland, where he served until 2015 in College Park, Maryland.
During the period of 1992 to 1994 he was an Associate Engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, and between 1989 and 1990 Dr. Young served as a Volunteer with the United States Peace Corps, stationed in Cameroon, West Africa.
Understand how small automated-electric vehicles , when operating within an automated transit network (ATN) system framework, provide substantial public mobility benefits, and thereby gaining an appreciation of how charging infrastructure and operations will need to be carefully analyzed to minimize fleet size and maximize fleet duty-cycles.
Understand NREL’s studies of 10 pilot deployments of AV technology for public mobility, and their assessment of the benchmarks for system safety and performance established within the ASCE Automated People Mover standards – in particular for the new small-vehicle APM subclassification called Automated Transit Network systems. Gain an appreciation of how automated systems have been in operation for years on dedicated transit ways, but how some of these small-vehicle systems that are self-steering are beginning to operate off of the dedicated transitway structures using basic intelligent roadway infrastructure to insure safety when crossing roadway traffic flows.
Research has been underway over the past 5 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to understand the evolution of Automated Mobility Districts (AMD), a term used to describe multiple modes operating automatically in an integrated fashion to serve dense urban settings and other like busy activity centers. AMD research began by tracking and cataloging the progress of 10 automated/autonomous vehicle (AV) technology deployments in managed fleets, mostly in the US starting in 2018. Some early AV site deployments have provided mobility on-demand with direct origin-to-destination service, and other AV sites have concentrated on fixed route transport. These early demonstrations utilized automated-electric small vehicle technologies as opposed to bus-size vehicles with internal combustion engines. Electric propulsion in rubber-tired public transport at the district or activity center scale had previously been almost exclusive limited to the “automated people mover” (APM) class of transit, such as the 100 passenger APM vehicles commonly found in airports and similar major activity centers. But there is a growing subclass of small automated-electric vehicle systems which have been deployed to operate on dedicated transitways is now defined as “automated transit networks” (ATNs) in the latest issue of the ANSI/ASCE 21-21 Automated People Mover Standards. ATN systems with vehicle capacity up to 25 passengers are characterized by the capability to provide on-demand service from off-line stations, thereby accommodating a direct ride between a passenger’s origin and their destination stations. One such ATN system that has been included in the 10 AV site monitoring in the NREL research studies is poised to become a “crossover” technology operating both on dedicated transitways as well as at grade using battery-electric propulsion vehicles. The associated European site of this ATN technology’s deployment is near Rotterdam and it has been operating self-driving vehicles within its dedicated transit-way with a Level 4 automation for over 20 years. Other fully automated small-vehicle ATN technologies with battery-electric propulsion are operating in other locations around the world, and new ATN technologies are currently in active development. Although most ATN applications utilize grade-separated transitway alignments, the presentation discusses this cross-over technology application of interest in the Netherlands which operates at-grade along with conventional roadway vehicles and pedestrians – but not in mixed traffic conditions. Rather, conventional roadway users utilize crossings placed along the transitway alignment at specific locations controlled by gate-arms similar to those used at many light rail transit roadway crossings. The ability of this ATN system to operate at grade using gate arms, is a basic form of intelligent roadway infrastructure that the authors have described in a published technical paper for the 2022 BAM Forum, which was also included in an SAE Journal publication (1.) as a means to provide a near-term implementation to integrate ATN small vehicle technology into the built environment. The presentation will discuss the benefits of the ATN vehicle capabilities to operate on dedicated lanes (both for safety and performance), while also retaining the capability to cross at-grade roadways that are protected by the intelligent infrastructure, resulting in safety-affirmative signaling to insure that no oncoming vehicle fails to yield right-of-way, and thus present a safety hazard. One of the 10 AV deployment sites being tracked in Jacksonville will be highlighted for its planned use of aerial transitways in the downtown district, while also using at-grade AV lanes in the areas surrounding downtown. In light of the ATN definition of small, electric vehicles deployed in a fully automated, managed fleet operation that can provide on-demand transit with direct origin-to-destination service, the presentation explores the applicability of the ATN concept directly to AV fleet deployments. Several of the 10 early deployment sites studied which meet these characteristics are used as examples of this “crossover” aspect of vehicle technology. The presentation concludes with an overview of the research program findings and conclusions achieved to date, as well as a synopsis of the challenges found and possible approaches to achieving fully automated electric-vehicle AV operations on a large scale in urban settings. In particular, the summary of research describes the ongoing assessment of how the electrification of vehicle systems with battery-electric propulsion and the required provision of the associated charging technology infrastructure will impact implementation costs. Further, the presentation summary describes how the NREL research is investigating the increased fleet management complexity when the system electrification must be managed in an integrated manner with the fully automated fleet operations. In particular, the implications of automated system operations will be discussed with respect to increasing fleet size and for battery-electric vehicle duty cycles. (1.) Safe Operations at Roadway Junctions – Design Principles from Automated Guideway Transit; Selected by SAE as one of the best papers at the 2022 BAM Forum and chosen for publication in the 2022 SAE International Journal of Advances and Current Practices in Mobility.
