No driver, No Regulation? --Online Legal Driving Behavior Monitoring for Self-driving Vehicles

Defined traffic laws must be respected by all vehicles. However, it is essential to know which behaviors violate the current laws, especially when a responsibility issue is involved in an accident. This brings challenges of digitizing human-driver-oriented traffic laws and monitoring vehicles' behaviors continuously. To address these challenges, this paper aims to digitize traffic law comprehensively and provide an application for online monitoring of legal driving behavior for autonomous vehicles. This paper introduces a layered trigger domain-based traffic law digitization architecture with digitization-classified discussions and detailed atomic propositions for online monitoring. The principal laws on a highway and at an intersection are taken as examples, and the corresponding logic and atomic propositions are introduced in detail. Finally, the digitized traffic laws are verified on the Chinese highway and intersection datasets, and defined thresholds are further discussed according to the driving behaviors in the considered dataset. This study can help manufacturers and the government in defining specifications and laws and can also be used as a useful reference in traffic laws compliance decision-making. Source code is available on https://github.com/SOTIF-AVLab/DOTL.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figure

Mecanismos normativos para favorecer la formalización de transporte de vehículos menores en el distrito de Nuevo Chimbote, 2022

El objetivo de esta investigación fue establecer los mecanismos normativos que favorecen el proceso de formalización de vehículos menores en el Distrito de Nuevo Chimbote, 2022. La investigación fue de tipo básica, enfoque cuantitativo, nivel descriptivo, no experimental con una muestra de 330 mototaxistas formales del distrito de Nuevo Chimbote, la técnica empleada para recolectar los datos fue la encuesta, el instrumento el cuestionario. Los resultados revelaron que el 52.4% de conductores mototaxistas valoró las normas relacionadas con la regularización del transporte público de mototaxis, en un nivel regular. Asimismo, se describió cada proceso normativo como: el permiso de operación, requisitos de obtención del permiso, concesión de uso de paradero, requisitos de uso de paradero, credencial y requisitos de la credencial del conductor, registro de transportadores, registro de conductores, registro de vehículos, paraderos formales y características de los paraderos. Concluyendo que, las normativas vigentes respecto a la circulación de mototaxistas, no son lo suficientemente claras, explicitas o van en contravía de la realidad social, por ende, el conductor lo percibe como exigua y opta por la informalidad, asimismo los beneficios que ofrece la formalización pueden resultarles poco relevantes, por esos u otros motivos es que valoran las normas como regulares

Methodology for Specifying and Testing Traffic Rule Compliance for Automated Driving

The introduction of highly-automated driving functions promises to increase safety and comfort, but the safety validation remains an unsolved challenge. Here, the requirement is that the introduction does not reduce safety on public roads. This dissertation addresses one major aspect of road safety: traffic rule compliance. Even an automated vehicle must comply with existing traffic rules. The developed method enables automated testing of traffic rule compliance of automated driving functions. In the first part of the thesis, the state of the art for describing and formalizing behavioral rules is analyzed. A special challenge is posed by the different traffic rules depending on the traffic region. With existing approaches, a separate description and formalization of the behavior rules is necessary for each traffic region or even for individual traffic areas. This shows the necessity to develop new approaches for the abstraction and transferability of the behavioral rules in order to reduce the effort of testing and ensuring traffic rule compliance. The rule compliance criteria are to be integrated into the behavior specification within the functional specification. The objective of this thesis is to develop a method to formalize the limits of traffic rule compliance, based on which fail criteria for system testing are defined and applied. For this purpose, existing traffic rules are analyzed as a basis to identify which behavior constraints are imposed by the static traffic environment. Based on this, a semantic description that is transferable between traffic domains and that links the boundaries of traffic rule compliance to the static traffic environment is developed. The method involves deriving behavioral attributes from which the semantic behavior description is constructed. These behavioral attributes construct the behavior space that describes the boundaries of legally allowed behavior. Furthermore, methods for automated derivation of behavioral attributes from high definition maps are developed, thus extracting the behavioral requirement from an operational design domain. It is investigated which functionalities an automated vehicle has to provide to comply with the behavioral attributes. The attributes are then formalized to obtain quantifiable failure criteria of traffic rule compliance that can be used in automated testing. Finally, building on the state of the art, a test strategy for validating traffic rule conformance is presented. The explicit availability of the behavioral limits results in an advantage in the influence analysis of possible parameters for these tests. Finally, the developed method is applied to existing map material and to test drives with an automated vehicle prototype in order to investigate the practical applicability of the approach as well as the resulting gain in knowledge about traffic rule compliance testing. The developed approach allows to derive the behavioral specification with respect to traffic rule conformance as an essential part of the functional specification independent of the application domain. It is proven that the approach is able to test the traffic rule conformance of an automated vehicle in different test scenarios within an application domain. By applying the developed methodology, it was possible to identify defects in the investigated test vehicle with respect to rule understanding and compliance

Capability-Based Routes for Autonomous Vehicles

The pursuit of vehicle automation is an ongoing trend in the automotive industry. Particularly challenging is the goal of introducing driverless autonomous vehicles (AVs) into road traffic. To realize this vision, a targeted development of autonomous driving functions is essential. However, a targeted development process is only possible if the driving functions are tailored as appropriately and completely as possible to the operational design domain (ODD). Regardless of use case, all AVs have one thing in common: driving at least one route from A to B - whether simple or complex. For operational purposes, it is therefore necessary to ensure that the driving requirements (DRs) of the potential routes within the ODD do not exceed the driving capabilities (DCs) of the AVs. Currently, there is no approach that accomplishes the identification of exceeded capabilities. This work presents a method for route-based specification of DRs and DCs for AVs. It addresses the core research question of how to identify routes with DRs that do not exceed the DCs of AVs. An initial analysis reveals the dependencies between route and DRs. Thereby, the scenery defined in the ODD is found to be a fundamental basis for the specification of behavioral requirements as part of the DRs. In combination with the applicable traffic rules, the scenery elements define the behavioral limits for AVs. These limits are specifically extracted and classified as behavioral demands from the scenery using an analysis of these combinations. To enable a route-based specification of DRs, the behavioral demands are modeled as behavior spaces and transformed into a generic map representation - the Behavior-Semantic Scenery Description (BSSD). Based on the BSSD, a method is developed that generates behavioral requirements based on the route-constrained concatenation of behavior spaces. As a result, in addition to the method itself, the associated behavioral requirements are available as a basis for the route-based specification of DRs and DCs. Constraints for the specification are defined by the developed concept for the matching of DRs and DCs. It is shown that the DRs are strongly dependent on the geometry and property of the scenery elements, so that equal behavioral requirements do not necessarily imply equal DRs. These dependencies are used for the specification enabling the definition of matching criteria for a selection of DRs and corresponding DCs. To realize the matching, a capability-based route search is developed and implemented. The route search incorporates all elaborated results of the work enabling the whole approach to be evaluated by applying it to a real road network. The evaluation shows that the identification of feasible routes for AVs based on the scenery is possible and which hurdles based on identified deficits still have to be overcome

A validation process for a legal formalization method

peer reviewedThis volume contains the papers presented at LN2FR 2022: The International Workshop on Methodologies for Translating Legal Norms into Formal Representations, held on December 14, 2022 in a hybrid form (in person workshop was held in Saarland University, Saarbrucken) in association with 35th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2022). Using symbolic logic or similar methods of knowledge representation to formalise legal norms is one of the most traditional goals of legal informatics as a scientific discipline. More than mere theoretical value, this approach is also connected to promising real-world applications involving, e.g., the observance of legal norms by highly automated machines or even the (partial) automatisation of legal reasoning, leading to new automated legal services. Albeit the long research tradition on the use of logic to formalise legal norms-be it by using classic logic systems (e.g., first-order logic), be it by attempting to construct a specific system of logic of norms (e.g., deontic logic)-, many challenges involved in the development of an adequate methodology for the formalisation of concrete legal regulations remain unsolved. This includes not only the choice of a sufficiently expressive formal language or model, but also the concrete way through which a legal text formulated in natural language is to be translated into the formal representation. The workshop LN2FR seeked to explore the various challenges connected with the task of using formal languages and models to represent legal norms in a machine-readable manner. We had 13 submissions, which were reviewed by 2 or 3 reviewers. Among these, we selected 11 papers (seven long papers, three short papers, one published paper) for presentation and discussion