Traffic Scenario Logic: A Spatial-Temporal Logic for Modeling and Reasoning of Urban Traffic Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper introduces Traffic Scenario Logic (TSL), a formal spatial-temporal logic for modeling complex urban traffic scenarios, enabling better verification and decision-making in autonomous driving systems.

Contribution

TSL is a novel formal logic that models urban traffic scenarios directly from industry-standard maps, overcoming previous limitations to simpler or highway scenarios.

Findings

Effective in generating diverse urban traffic test scenarios

Integrates with industry-standard high-definition maps

Open-sourced implementation available

Abstract

Formal representations of traffic scenarios can be used to generate test cases for the safety verification of autonomous driving. However, most existing methods are limited to highway or highly simplified intersection scenarios due to the intricacy and diversity of traffic scenarios. In response, we propose Traffic Scenario Logic (TSL), which is a spatial-temporal logic designed for modeling and reasoning of urban pedestrian-free traffic scenarios. TSL provides a formal representation of the urban road network that can be derived from OpenDRIVE, i.e., the de facto industry standard of high-definition maps for autonomous driving, enabling the representation of a broad range of traffic scenarios without discretization approximations. We implemented the reasoning of TSL using Telingo, i.e., a solver for temporal programs based on Answer Set Programming, and tested it on different urban road layouts. Demonstrations show the effectiveness of TSL in test scenario generation and its potential value in areas like decision-making and control verification of autonomous driving. The code for TSL reasoning has been open-sourced.