Redefining Safety for Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper argues that current safety standards for autonomous vehicles are insufficient for real-world deployment and proposes updated safety definitions to better address the unique challenges posed by autonomous systems operating in open environments.

Contribution

It introduces revised safety definitions that incorporate the complexities of autonomous vehicle operation, including open-world environments and sociotechnical system interactions.

Findings

Current safety standards are inadequate for autonomous vehicles in open environments.

Proposed new safety definitions address legal, ethical, and operational challenges.

Frameworks for evolving safety approaches are suggested for autonomous systems.

Abstract

Existing definitions and associated conceptual frameworks for computer-based system safety should be revisited in light of real-world experiences from deploying autonomous vehicles. Current terminology used by industry safety standards emphasizes mitigation of risk from specifically identified hazards, and carries assumptions based on human-supervised vehicle operation. Operation without a human driver dramatically increases the scope of safety concerns, especially due to operation in an open world environment, a requirement to self-enforce operational limits, participation in an ad hoc sociotechnical system of systems, and a requirement to conform to both legal and ethical constraints. Existing standards and terminology only partially address these new challenges. We propose updated definitions for core system safety concepts that encompass these additional considerations as a starting point for evolving safe-ty approaches to address these additional safety challenges. These results might additionally inform framing safety terminology for other autonomous system applications.