Beyond Safety Drivers: Staffing a Teleoperations System for Autonomous Vehicles
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Driverless vehicles promise a host of societal benefits including dramatically improved safety, increased accessibility, greater productivity, and higher quality of life. As this new technology approaches widespread deployment, both industry and government are making provisions for teleoperations systems in which remote human agents provide assistance to driverless vehicles. This assistance can involve real-time remote operation and even ahead-of-time input via human-in-the-loop artificial intelligence systems. In this paper, we address the problem of staffing such a remote support center. Our analysis focuses on the tradeoffs between the total number of remote agents, the reliability of the remote support system, and the resulting safety of the driverless vehicles. By establishing a novel connection between queueing models and storage processes, we determine the probability of the system exceeding its service capacity. This connection drives our staffing methodology. We also develop a numerical method to compute the exact staffing level needed to achieve various performance measures. This moment generating function based technique may be of independent interest, and our overall staffing analysis may be of use in other applications that combine human expertise and automated systems.
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