Future scenarios for autonomous fleets

New Challenges and Opportunities for Urban Mobility

The dark sides of unleashed individual traffic present great challenges for all the stakeholders involved. Integrated mobility concepts are needed to meet their diverse requirements. In addition to reducing the volume of traffic, this also includes a comfortable and environmentally friendly service. In order to integrate these concepts into everyday life on a sustainable basis, it is above all the cities themselves that must be involved.

Alternatives to the private automobile are already conquering metropolises – from e-scooters to car-sharing services to cable cars. Advances in autonomous driving and the digitalisation of cities are now opening up new possibilities for the transport of people and goods.

Music: Embers and Ashes by Anenon

The “Vision URBANETIC” study by Mercedes-Benz Vans shows how autonomous fleets can improve urban mobility in the future. The concept vehicle is based on a modular principle: the driving platform can be equipped spontaneously with various functional modules such as a passenger cell or a cargo space. If a van transports passengers during the day and handles goods logistics at night, this not only increases its efficiency but also significantly relieves the burden on inner-city traffic. But an autonomous fleet is made of many more parts than just its vehicles – mobility providers also need a software ecosystem to operate their fleet.

Tangible stories in the Copenhagen of the future

In cooperation with Mercedes-Benz Vans, Intuity developed a virtual model of the city of Copenhagen in order to make this interaction between passenger, mobility provider and urban infrastructure tangible. In virtual Copenhagen, individual aspects of the fleet ecosystem are told through concrete stories. In this way, the possibilities of the future mobility solution can be visually experienced.

On the one hand, the scenarios illustrate the human side of the solution: How can the service better meet people’s future needs? On the other hand, they also explain the technical background, i.e. the interaction of the individual system components in the complex context of a city. The scenarios illustrate, for example, how the entire fleet can react to unplanned obstacles detected by a single vehicle. Additionally, the advantages of preventive load management based on external sources are also explained. Last but not least, the ecosystem also handles situations in which the best solution is not a technical process but direct human communication between operator and passenger. All these topics were brought to life on our virtual stage.

We look forward to rethinking mobility in urban areas together with Mercedes-Benz Vans – because ultimately all the presented concepts and scenarios are about the essential question that drives us: “How do we want to live in the future?”