1667240 - Public Health Benefits of Connected and Autonomous Vehicle During a Pandemic

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are capable of centralized control, information sharing through connectivity, and integrated surveillance. Also, CAVs are readily amenable to innovative design concepts, including disease detection devices in the interior design that could inherently help reduce the propagation of infectious disease. In the absence of real-life data on the efficacy of CAVs, this study aims to develop an analytical tool to predict the spatial-temporal transmission of an infectious disease based on the characteristics of the transportation system, control and intervention policies, and travel behavior, with and without CAVs. In this regard, we develop an epidemiologic model to predict the spread of an infectious disease in the prospective future era of CAVs. Numerical experiments are conducted to analyze the effects of CAVs and the behavior of persons in preventing the spread of disease. The numerical results suggest that CAV services can significantly decrease the number of infected and exposed persons during a pandemic. Also, providing more CAVs to serve more passengers has the added benefit of decreasing the number of infected and exposed people. Moreover, we analyzed two different social behaviors: conservative and non-conservative behavior after recovery. The results suggest that having conservative behaviors by people after their recovery period is effective in alleviating the pandemic. Also, the analyses show that, under a limited budget, serving the passengers of the modes with higher infection risks, even by serving a portion of the travelers on them (around 34%), is more effective compared to serving other risk classes.