Scenario-Based Safety Assessment Framework for Automated Vehicles

Automated vehicles (AVs) are expected to increase traffic safety and traffic efficiency, among others by enabling flexible mobility-on-demand systems. This is particularly important in Singapore, being one of the world's most densely populated countries, which is why the Singaporean authorities are currently actively facilitating the deployment of AVs. As a consequence, however, the need arises for a formal AV road approval procedure. To this end, a safety assessment framework is proposed, which combines aspects of the standardized functional safety design methodology with a traffic scenario-based approach. The latter involves using driving data to extract AV-relevant traffic scenarios. The underlying approach is based on decomposition of scenarios into elementary events, subsequent scenario parametrization, and sampling of the estimated probability density functions of the scenario parameters to create test scenarios. The resulting test scenarios are subsequently employed for virtual testing in a simulation environment and physical testing on a proving ground and in real life. As a result, the proposed assessment pipeline thus provides statistically relevant and quantitative measures for the AV performance in a relatively short time frame due to the simulation-based approach. Ultimately, the proposed methodology provides authorities with a formal road approval procedure for AVs. In particular, the proposed methodology will support the Singaporean Land Transport Authority for road approval of AVs.

Ontology for Scenarios for the Assessment of Automated Vehicles

The development of assessment methods for the performance of Automated Vehicles (AVs) is essential to enable and speed up the deployment of automated driving technologies, due to the complex operational domain of AVs. As traditional methods for assessing vehicles are not applicable for AVs, other approaches have been proposed. Among these, real-world scenario-based assessment is widely supported by many players in the automotive field. In this approach, test cases are derived from real-world scenarios that are obtained from driving data. To minimize any ambiguity regarding these test cases and scenarios, a clear definition of the notion of scenario is required. In this paper, we propose a more concrete definition of scenario, compared to what is known to the authors from the literature. This is achieved by proposing an ontology in which the quantitative building blocks of a scenario are defined. An example illustrates that the presented ontology is applicable for scenario-based assessment of AVs.