Evaluation of the Cost of Intelligent Upgrades of Transportation Infrastructure for Intelligent Connected Vehicles

Intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) have become the focus and development direction of the automobile industry. As a flexible intelligent terminal, ICVs will become a necessary part of the intelligent transportation system. The routes of developing ICVs based on "vehicle to X" (V2X) can effectively alleviate the demands of vehicles for intelligent functions and cut related research costs, accelerating commercialization of ICVs and leading to many social benefits. At present, China has made it clear to develop ICVs based on V2X, which requires simultaneous intelligent upgrades of vehicles and transportation infrastructure. Therefore, intelligent upgrades of transportation infrastructure must match the functional requirements of ICVs. In addition, the investment in intelligent upgrades of transportation infrastructure is mainly from the government, so the costs must be controlled reasonably to find the most cost-effective upgrade route. In this paper, the types of intelligent transportation infrastructures were determined by sorting out the demands of ICVs for transportation infrastructure, and the deployment methods and upgrade routes of intelligent transportation infrastructures were designed. Then, the cost evaluation model for intelligent upgrade of transportation infrastructures was established, based on which, the cost evaluation of different intelligent upgrade routes of transportation infrastructure was carried out in closed highway and open urban road scenarios to determine the optimal route. Besides, the key elements affecting the cost of transportation infrastructure upgrades were identified, and their impact degrees on transportation infrastructure upgraded were analyzed by scenario analysis. The results show that the intelligent transportation infrastructure for advanced ICVs mainly includes communication base stations, roadside units (RSUs), vision sensors, millimeter-wave radars, laser radars (LiDARs), meteorological sensors, intelligent signal machines, edge computing servers, and cloud computing centers. The route of deploying primary intelligent transportation infrastructure at first and then directly upgrading them to advanced level can well match the functional requirements of ICVs on the basis of lower costs. The costs of RSUs, LIDARS, and edge computing servers as well as data transmission rate of 5G are key elements affecting the costs of intelligent upgrades of transportation infrastructure.