Compensating for the Absence of a Required Accompanying Person: A Draft of a Functional System Architecture for an Automated Vehicle

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hierarchical system architecture for automated vehicles to ensure safety and independence for users who rely on human assistance, addressing the challenge of compensating for the absence of an accompanying person.

Contribution

It introduces a functional system architecture tailored to meet special user needs in automated vehicles, emphasizing the importance of operational design domain considerations.

Findings

Requirements for compensating the absence of an accompanying person identified

Hierarchical functional system architecture proposed for safety and independence

Use case illustrating the implementation of functionalities

Abstract

A major challenge in the development of a fully automated vehicle is to enable a large variety of users to use the vehicle independently and safely. Particular demands arise from user groups who rely on human assistance when using conventional cars. For the independent use of a vehicle by such groups, the vehicle must compensate for the absence of an accompanying person, whose actions and decisions ensure the accompanied person's safety even in unknown situations. The resulting requirements cannot be fulfilled only by the geometric design of the vehicle and the nature of its control elements. Special user needs must be taken into account in the entire automation of the vehicle. In this paper, we describe requirements for compensating for the absence of an accompanying person and show how required functions can be located in a hierarchical functional system architecture of an automated vehicle. In addition, we outline the relevance of the vehicle's operational design domain in this context and present a use case for the described functionalities.