The French Program La Route Automatisée

• improve safety, comfort, and infrastructure efficiency; • reduce nuisances such as noise, traffic congestion, and the automobile's encroachment on living space and daily activities; • reduce ecological damage such as air, soil, and water pollution; and • provide transportation for all. RA's main support comes from three government organizations: Inrets (Institut National de Recherche sur les Transports et leur Sécurité, www.inrets.fr), Inria (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, www.inria.fr), and the LCPC (Laboratoire Central des Ponts et Chaussées, www.lcpc.fr). Major assistance comes from three top-level engineering schools: Ecole des Mines de Paris, Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications. To carry out RA research, these organizations founded the LaRA consortium (www.lara. prd.fr) in 1997. However, most LaRA members have been involved separately in driving-automation programs, such as Prometheus, since the mid '80s. Because the consortium primarily involves public institutes, most of its operation is publicly funded. However, the consortium has received grants for various programs from agencies from other European Union countries and from the European Union and is working with a number of major corporations. For example, the latest of these programs , Carsense, started in January 2000 and is funded by the European Union as part of the IST (Information Society Technologies) program. Besides the LaRA consortium, Carsense involves three car manufacturers (BMW, Fiat, and Renault) and five component manufacturers (Thomson, Autocruise, TRW, IBEO, and Daimler-Jena). The program investigates sensor fusion in vehicles for low-speed driving automation (such as in stop-and-go traffic). Up to now, LaRA has used a scenario approach to organize its research. This approach aims to determine typical configurations that justify the introduction of RA technology, taking into account user needs and environmental constraints. To develop the scenarios, LaRA used a methodology based on functional system analysis (see Figure 1). The consortium attempted to identify common elements among the scenarios to minimize the number of functions to develop. In this article, we discuss the top two levels of our methodology: context and scenarios. The French road network is large (approximately one million km), and only a small proportion of it (12,000 km) consists of superhighways. It is less safe than the networks of other European countries. In France, traffic accidents are a major problem , inflicting an annual cost of 20 billion Euros (over US$22 billion). Most casualties occur on rural roads. However, the severity of accidents …