Assuring the safety of advanced driver assistance systems through a combination of simulation and runtime monitoring

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles will share the road with human drivers within the next couple of years. One of the big open challenges is the lack of established and cost-efficient approaches for assuring the safety of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and autonomous driving. Product liability regulations impose high standards on manufacturers regarding the safe operation of such systems. Today’s conventional engineering methods are not adequate for providing such guarantees in a cost-efficient way. One strategy for reducing the cost of quality assurance is transferring a significant part of the testing effort from road tests to (systemlevel) simulations. It is not clear, however, how results obtained from simulations transfer to the road. In this paper, we present a method for ensuring that an Advanced Driver Assistance System satisfies its safety requirements at runtime and operates within safe limits that were tested in simulations. Our approach utilizes runtime monitors that are generated from safety requirements and trained using simulated test cases. We evaluate our approach using an industrial prototype of a lane change assistant and data recorded in road tests on German highways.