Towards Assume-Guarantee Profiles for Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic method for creating supervisory specifications for autonomous vehicles using assume-guarantee contracts, aiming to improve decision-making and accountability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel framework for generating assume-guarantee profiles for autonomous vehicles, addressing consistency, completeness, and blame attribution.

Findings

Framework ensures better decision-making in autonomous vehicles

Contract structure aids in blame attribution for undesirable events

Game-theoretic examples demonstrate framework applicability

Abstract

Rules or specifications for autonomous vehicles are currently formulated on a case-by-case basis, and put together in a rather ad-hoc fashion. As a step towards eliminating this practice, we propose a systematic procedure for generating a set of supervisory specifications for self-driving cars that are 1) associated with a distributed assume-guarantee structure and 2) characterizable by the notion of consistency and completeness. Besides helping autonomous vehicles make better decisions on the road, the assume-guarantee contract structure also helps address the notion of blame when undesirable events occur. We give several game-theoretic examples to demonstrate applicability of our framework.