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The advent of Industry 4.0 has engendered opportunities for a coalescence of digital technologies that collectively enable driverless vehicles to operate during the construction and use of a highway. Yet, hitherto scant research has been conducted to review these collective developments and/or sample construction practitioner opinion on them. This study aims to present a systematic review of extant literature on the application of driverless technologies in civil engineering and in particular, the highways infrastructure sector and offers insight into the limitations of associated barriers to full adoption, namely, current technological development processes, legal deficiencies and societal concerns. In so doing, this work presents a vignette of contemporary developments augmented by a critical analysis from practitioners’ perceptions.

A mixed philosophical methodological approach is adopted for this inductive research study. Interpretivism is used to critically analyse the literature and post-positivism to perform content analysis of the literature and synthesis of the discourse with practitioners. A total of 44 related papers published between 1998 and 2019 have been included in this study. Emergent themes identified from literature are then discussed in some further detail, namely, 1) automation and robotics; 2) case studies and simulations; and 3) safety and ergonomics). A focus group is then held with leading industrialists to discuss their experiences of advanced driverless technology applications in practice. Based upon a culmination of emergent evidence, a conceptual model of prevailing barriers is then developed to further elucidate upon the challenges facing the highways infrastructure sector.

Research into driverless technologies within the highways infrastructure sector has received relatively scant academic attention. Hitherto, most advancements made have stemmed from multidisciplinary teams consisting of engineering, information technology and social scientist researchers. There is insufficient supporting evidence of civil engineering and construction academics input into developments made – suggesting that prototype products often fail to adequately consider practical applications in the highways infrastructure sector at the design and use case stage. This view is substantiated by feedback from leading industry experts who participated in unstructured telephone interviews. Their feedback suggests that practical applications of products have been beset with problems, thus creating a perception that advanced technologies are largely “unusable” within the highways infrastructure sector and so are unsuitable for large-scale (and particularly bespoke) industrial applications.

This research critically synthesises the prevailing scientific discourse within extant literature on driverless technologies implemented but also garners practitioner feedback from leading UK industrialists on their applications in practice. Hitherto, this combined analysis approach has been rarely used in spite of it having significant advantages of tacit knowledge reflection on technologies used, where such can be used as a basis for further informed discourse and/or development. Moreover, this work culminates in a conceptual model that acts as a catalyst for future research investigations.

Automated vehicles are likely to have significant impacts on the transport system such as increased road capacity, more productive/enjoyable time spent travelling in a car, and increased vehicle kilometres travelled. However, there is a great risk that automated driving may negatively impact the environment if adequate policies are not put in place. This chapter examines the effects of driverless vehicles and the types of policies required to attain sustainable implementation of the technology. To understand the effects on a systemic level, and to understand the needs and impacts of policies, the dynamics must be understood. Therefore, a causal loop diagram (CLD) is developed and analysed. One important insight is that the effects of driverless vehicles are mainly on the vehicular level (e.g., the reduced number of accidents per vehicle). These effects can be cancelled out on a systemic level (e.g., due to increased vehicle-kilometre travelled (VKT) that increases total number of accidents). The marginal costs of road transport are central to both freight and passenger transport. Automation will reduce marginal costs and shift the equilibrium in the transport system towards a state with higher VKT. This will lead to greater energy consumption and higher emissions. To attain sustainability goals, there might be a need to balance this reduction of marginal costs by using policy instruments. In the work, CLDs is experienced to be a useful tool to support the collaboration between experts from different fields in the dialogue about policies.

This is the second part of a two-part paper which aims to provide an insight into the ethical and legal issues surrounding certain classes of robot. This part is concerned with law.

Following an introduction, this paper first describes the European RoboLaw project and then considers legal issues and activities relating to civilian airborne drones, driverless road vehicles and assistive robots. It concludes with a short discussion.

The legal issues associated with many classes of robot are the topic of much debate, and efforts are underway to create appropriate legislative frameworks. A project is presently seeking to create a framework for the development of a Europe-wide “Robolaw” and in certain cases, laws are already being formulated to accommodate recent robotic developments. These deliberations are rapidly gaining pace and are now also considering future generations of highly autonomous and intelligent robots.

This paper provides an insight into the highly topical and complex issue of robot law.

Automated guide vehicles (AGVs) are driverless vehicles that perform material handling operations in both flexible and conventional facilities. We provide here a review of recent work on the design of AGV guide paths and dispatching rules, including related issues such as idle vehicle location, and location of pickup and delivery stations. Different types of guide paths and related layouts, including optimal and heuristic approaches to the path design, are reviewed here. Dispatching rules and algorithms, including zone control, are also proposed and compared with commonly‐used rules.

Developments regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in transportation systems, one of the important stakeholders of tourism, are remarkable. However, no review thus far has provided a comprehensive overview of research on AI in transportation systems.

To fill this gap, this study uses the VOSviewer software to present a bibliometric review of the current scientific literature in the field of AI-related tourism research. The theme of AI in transportation systems was explored in the Web of Science database.

The original search yielded 642 documents, which were then filtered by parameters. For publications related to AI in transportation systems, the most cited documents, leading authors, productive countries, co-occurrence analysis of keywords and bibliographic matching of documents were examined. This report shows that there has been a recent increase in research on AI in transport systems. However, there is only one study on tourism. The country that contributed the most is China with 298 studies. The most used keyword in the documents was intelligent transportation system.

The bibliometric analysis of the existing work provided a valuable and seminal reference for researchers and practitioners in AI-related in transportation system.

Freight network planning and the application of distribution innovations are popular fields of research on sustainable urban logistics. However, considerable research on freight network design lacks a comprehensive consideration of the application of distribution innovations. This observation implies that sustainable urban freight research appears highly fragmented in topics of network design and distribution innovations. From the perspective of long-term planning, this situation possibly serves as a barrier to further promotion of sustainability. The objective of this paper is to analyze existing research gaps of literature to further promote the sustainability of urban logistics systems from a future perspective.

This paper employs a systematic literature review (SLR) method, which covers 164 papers and research works published in 2013–2018. The article corpus involved the innovative schemes of freight network design and the emerging delivery concepts in cities. Based on an analysis of articles' relevance, the most significant research contributions on both city logistics network design and exploitation of distribution innovations are detected.

This paper has found four research gaps in aspects of network design and distribution innovations. To respond to these gaps, we propose the research framework of sustainable and flexible future urban freight planning (SFFUFP) based on trends of city development, while discussing further research direction on urban freight planning.

The authors have found four research gaps in aspects of both urban freight network design and distribution innovations in which scholars could be encouraged to contribute. The research framework of SFFUFP can further promote sustainable urban logistics from a view of future management.

There are ethical, legal, social and economic arguments surrounding the subject of autonomous vehicles. This paper aims to discuss some of the arguments to communicate one of the current issues in the rising field of artificial intelligence.

Making use of widely available literature that the author has read and summarised showcasing her viewpoints, the author shows that technology is progressing every day. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are at the forefront of technological advancement today. The manufacture and innovation of new machines have revolutionised our lives and resulted in a world where we are becoming increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence.

Technology might appear to be getting out of hand, but it can be effectively used to transform lives and convenience.

From robotics to autonomous vehicles, countless technologies have and will continue to make the lives of individuals much easier. But, with these advancements also comes something called “future shock”.

Future shock is the state of being unable to keep up with rapid social or technological change. As a result, the topic of artificial intelligence, and thus autonomous cars, is highly debated.

The study will be of interest to researchers, academics and the public in general. It will encourage further thinking.

This is an original piece of writing informed by reading several current pieces. The study has not been submitted elsewhere.