Scenario-Based Safety Assessment Framework for Automated Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents a scenario-based safety assessment framework for automated vehicles that combines functional safety principles with traffic scenario analysis to facilitate formal road approval in densely populated areas like Singapore.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AV safety assessment pipeline that integrates scenario decomposition, parametrization, and probabilistic sampling for efficient virtual and physical testing.

Findings

Provides statistically relevant safety measures through simulation

Enables rapid AV performance evaluation in diverse scenarios

Supports formal road approval processes for AVs in Singapore

Abstract

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.