Right in Time: Reactive Reasoning in Regulated Traffic Spaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reactive reasoning framework combining probabilistic inference and logical traffic regulations, enabling real-time, efficient decision-making for autonomous vehicles in complex, shared environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel reactive mission design approach that integrates Probabilistic Mission Design with Reactive Circuits for online, exact inference in hybrid domains.

Findings

Achieves significant speedup over previous probabilistic methods.

Enables real-time safety and compliance assertions for autonomous vehicles.

Demonstrated effectiveness in real-world vessel and urban drone scenarios.

Abstract

Exact inference in probabilistic First-Order Logic offers a promising yet computationally costly approach for regulating the behavior of autonomous agents in shared traffic spaces. While prior methods have combined logical and probabilistic data into decision-making frameworks, their application is often limited to pre-flight checks due to the complexity of reasoning across vast numbers of possible universes. In this work, we propose a reactive mission design framework that jointly considers uncertain environmental data and declarative, logical traffic regulations. By synthesizing Probabilistic Mission Design (ProMis) with reactive reasoning facilitated by Reactive Circuits (RC), we enable online, exact probabilistic inference over hybrid domains. Our approach leverages the Frequency of Change inherent in heterogeneous data streams to subdivide inference formulas into memoized, isolated tasks, ensuring that only the specific components affected by new sensor data are re-evaluated. In experiments involving both real-world vessel data and simulated drone traffic in dense urban scenarios, we demonstrate that our approach provides orders of magnitude in speedup over ProMis without reactive paradigms. This allows intelligent transportation systems, such as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), to actively assert safety and legal compliance during operations rather than relying solely on preparation procedures.