Special Journal Issue on Autonomous Vehicle Technologies

The ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering is currently accepting manuscripts for an April 2022 special issue: “Autonomous Vehicle Technologies: Risk, Resilience, and Reliability.” Authors who are interested in having their papers included in the special issue should submit their manuscripts by March 1, 2021.
 
Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) or drone robotics have gained traction beyond military and agricultural uses, such as monitoring crop growth, irrigation, and assessing crop health. Self-driving cars are making strides in technical advancement and are now maneuvering regulatory barriers in order to integrate gradually into society. Intelligent underwater systems undertake autonomous missions in coordination with above-surface robots. User acceptance is put to the test in the adoption of fully autonomous transit systems. Autonomous systems in general must harmoniously integrate hardware, software, and humans while conforming to principles of safety, security, and reliability.
 
This special issue is aimed at gathering contributions that discuss new theoretical developments and advanced applications of risk, reliability, and uncertainty assessment to support the management of autonomous vehicle technologies. More specifically, the special issue is soliciting papers discussing traditional deterministic, probabilistic, machine learning, and hybrid approaches to risk assessment across all lifecycle events of autonomous technologies. Interpretation and insights gained from the implementation of risk-informed frameworks are also encouraged at various levels of maturity and discussion, from philosophical and ethical standpoints. An account of the data—and uncertainties around the collection of such data—required for successful assessments, along with novel solutions to encounter such challenges, is welcome. Predictive analytics towards prognostic health management, techno-economic analysis, and loss prevention of autonomously engineered systems are also of interest.
 
Manuscripts to be included in the special issue should concentrate on a range of topics (but not limited to) risks associated with autonomous vehicle technologies; reliability and resilience associated with intelligent control systems; comprehensive review of risk, reliability, and resilience of engineered autonomous systems; analysis and interpretation of uncertainties in the understanding of autonomous vehicle risks; risk management and loss prevention across all lifecycles of the engineering process; the role of enabling technologies such as AI, deep learning, predictive analytics, IoT, and 5G; challenges in regulating design and operation of autonomous vehicles; authorities and industry collaboration challenges to close safety and security gaps; autonomous vehicle traffic safety and trajectory planning; identification of failure modes and determination of imprecise probabilities; development of use-case scenarios to integration analysis and interpretation of observations; and challenges in development and dissemination of standards
 
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to the journal by March 1, 2021, via Journals Connect at journaltool.asme.org. Authors who have an account should log in and select “Submit Paper” at the bottom of the page. Authors without an account should select “Submissions” and follow the steps. At the Paper Submittal page, authors should select the “ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering” and then select the special issue “Autonomous Vehicle Technologies: Risk, Resilience and Reliability (SI049B).” Papers received after the deadline or papers not selected for inclusion in the special issue may be accepted for publication in a regular issue.
 
The special issue guest editors are Mohammad Pourgol-Mohamad, PhD, University of Maryland, MD, USA, mpourgol@umd.edu; Arun Veeramany, PhD, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, WA, USA, arun.veeramany@pnnl.gov; and Bilal Ayyub, PhD, University of Maryland, MD, USA, ba@umd.edu.
 
For more information on the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering, visit https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/risk. To learn more about the ASME Journal Program, visit www.asme.org/publications-submissions/journals/information-for-authors.