Showcasing Automated Vehicle Prototypes: A Collaborative Release Process to Manage and Communicate Risk

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematic incremental release process for publicly demonstrating automated vehicle prototypes, aiming to improve safety communication, transparency, and decision-making in the deployment of autonomous driving technology.

Contribution

It introduces a structured release process tailored for automated vehicle prototypes, including stakeholder roles, process design, and practical implementation insights from the UNICAR$agil$ project.

Findings

Enhanced internal risk communication and transparency.

Disclosed design conflicts and improved stakeholder understanding.

Process applicability across different vehicle concepts and organizational structures.

Abstract

The development and deployment of automated vehicles pose major challenges for manufacturers to this day. Whilst central questions, like the issue of ensuring a sufficient level of safety, remain unanswered, prototypes are increasingly finding their way into public traffic in urban areas. Although safety concepts for prototypes are addressed in literature, published work hardly contains any dedicated considerations on a systematic release for their operation. In this paper, we propose an incremental release process for public demonstrations of prototypes' automated driving functionality. We explicate release process requirements, derive process design decisions, and define stakeholder tasks. Furthermore, we reflect on practical insights gained through implementing the release process as part of the UNICAR$agil$ research project, in which four prototypes based on novel vehicle concepts were built and demonstrated to the public. One observation is the improved quality of internal risk communication, achieved by dismantling information asymmetries between stakeholders. Design conflicts are disclosed - providing a contribution to nurture transparency and, thereby, supporting a valid basis for release decisions. We argue that our release process meets two important requirements, as the results suggest its applicability to the domain of automated driving and its scalability to different vehicle concepts and organizational structures.