Creating a Digital - Vehicle Proving Ground

12 1094-7167/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS industry has established more than 600 joint ventures and introduced 1,000 foreign technical inventions over the last 20 years. The total foreign investment has exceeded US$20 billion, more than 40 percent of the total Chinese automotive capital. The 2001 output reached 2.34 million vehicles, up from 0.71 million in 1991. This is a 3.3-fold increase and a 15 percent average annual increase, compared to the 1.5 percent annual increase worldwide in the same period. The 2002 output was 3.25 million vehicles. The driving force for the Chinese automotive industry is passenger cars, whose production increased from 81,000 in 1991 to 700,000 in 2001, a 8.7-fold increase and a 24 percent annual increase. The National Information Center estimates that in 2003 the demand for passenger cars in China will be 1.5 million: 1.435 million domestic cars, an increase of 26.4 percent, and 90,000 imports (International Finance News, 17 Dec. 2002). The Chinese automotive industry has a 5 percent share of the worldwide automobile market; its share should reach 20 percent by 2020, assuming a 5 percent annual increase and a total output of 10 million vehicles. Figure 1 shows China’s automobile output from 1990 to 2002. The Chinese automotive industry’s rapid growth demands an increased, enhanced effort in R&D in vehicular technology, reliability, quality, safety, human comfort, and environmental impact. In 1999, China created its National Center of Intelligent Transportation Systems Engineering and Technology (the ITSC) and established the National Field Testing Complex (NFTC), a state-of-art, comprehensive facility in Tong County, Beijing. One major task for the ITSC is R&D in intelligent-vehicle technology to enhance safety, reliability, and performance. The Complex Systems and Intelligence Science Lab at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has started a similar initiative. Since the early 1990s, the University of Arizona’s ATLAS (Advanced Traffic and Logistics Algorithms and Systems) and PARCS (Program for Research for Advanced Systems) research centers have also made significant progress in ITS, particularly in vehicle technology, as demonstrated by the VISTA (Vehicles with Intelligent Systems for Transport Automation) and digital-highway projects.1,2 To combine their strengths, in 2002 the ITSC, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Arizona agreed to conduct joint research on a digital automobile proving ground (DAPG) for automated-vehicle driving tests based on their Beijing and Tucson facilities. Here we describe this international collaboration’s status and progress.