Extending Urban Multi-Lane Spatial Logic to Formalise Road Junction Rules

TL;DR

This paper extends a spatial logic to formally specify UK road junction rules, integrating both spatial and temporal aspects to enhance autonomous vehicle safety verification.

Contribution

It introduces an extended spatial logic for formalising complex junction rules, facilitating comprehensive AV safety verification against traffic regulations.

Findings

Formalised three UK junction rules using the extended logic

Demonstrated the logic's abstraction level for entire junction rule sets

Laid groundwork for verifying AV behaviour against formalised rules

Abstract

During the design of autonomous vehicles (AVs), several stages should include a verification process to guarantee that the AV is driving safely on the roads. One of these stages is to assure the AVs abide by the road traffic rules. To include road traffic rules in the design of an AV, a precise and unambiguous formalisation of these rules is needed. However, only recently this has been pointed out as an issue for the design of AVs and the few works on this only capture the temporal aspects of the rules, leaving behind the spatial aspects. Here, we extend the spatial traffic logic, Urban Multi-lane Spatial Logic, to formalise a subset of the UK road junction rules, where both temporal and spatial aspects of the rules are captured. Our approach has an abstraction level for urban road junctions that could easily promote the formalisation of the whole set of road junction rules and we exemplarily formalise three of the UK road junction rules. Once we have the whole set formalised, we will model, implement, and formally verify the behaviour of an AV against road traffic rules so that guidelines for the creation of a Digital Highway Code for AVs can be established.