Highway Readiness Assessment for SAE Levels of Automation and V2X Notification
Road operators lack practical methods to assess infrastructure readiness for automated driving; this work provides a quantitative tool to identify gaps and communicate guidance.
The paper proposes a Highway Readiness Index (HRI) to quantify infrastructure readiness for SAE automation levels, demonstrated on a real corridor, and outlines integration into V2X messages for connected vehicles.
While highway automation is advancing rapidly, road operators still lack practical methods to assess the readiness of their infrastructures for supporting automated driving systems. This work proposes a quantitative Highway Readiness Index (HRI) that maps static Operational Design Domain (ODD) infrastructure conditions into measurable attributes and weights them through an expert survey to evaluate readiness across Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) automation levels. A real corridor case study shows how HRI scores can be computed, interpreted, and used to identify infrastructure gaps that limit higher automation. Finally, we outline how these indicators can be integrated into a standardized Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) message, i.e., Infrastructure-to-Vehicle Information Message (IVIM), to communicate segment-level automation guidance to connected vehicles.