Designing Trustworthy Autonomous Systems

The design of autonomous systems is challenging and ensuring their trustworthiness can have different meanings, such as i) ensuring consistency and completeness of the requirements by a correct elicitation and formalization process; ii) ensuring that requirements are correctly mapped to system implementations so that any system behaviors never violate its requirements; iii) maximizing the reuse of available components and subsystems in order to cope with the design complexity; and iv) ensuring correct coordination of the system with its environment.Several techniques have been proposed over the years to cope with specific problems. However, a holistic design framework that, leveraging on existing tools and methodologies, practically helps the analysis and design of autonomous systems is still missing. This thesis explores the problem of building trustworthy autonomous systems from different angles. We have analyzed how current approaches of formal verification can provide assurances: 1) to the requirement corpora itself by formalizing requirements with assume/guarantee contracts to detect incompleteness and conflicts; 2) to the reward function used to then train the system so that the requirements do not get misinterpreted; 3) to the execution of the system by run-time monitoring and enforcing certain invariants; 4) to the coordination of the system with other external entities in a system of system scenario and 5) to system behaviors by automatically synthesize a policy which is correct

Model-Based Engineering of Collaborative Embedded Systems

This Open Access book presents the results of the "Collaborative Embedded Systems" (CrESt) project, aimed at adapting and complementing the methodology underlying modeling techniques developed to cope with the challenges of the dynamic structures of collaborative embedded systems (CESs) based on the SPES development methodology. In order to manage the high complexity of the individual systems and the dynamically formed interaction structures at runtime, advanced and powerful development methods are required that extend the current state of the art in the development of embedded systems and cyber-physical systems. The methodological contributions of the project support the effective and efficient development of CESs in dynamic and uncertain contexts, with special emphasis on the reliability and variability of individual systems and the creation of networks of such systems at runtime. The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the case studies are therefore selected from areas that are highly relevant for Germany’s economy (automotive, industrial production, power generation, and robotics). It also supports the digitalization of complex and transformable industrial plants in the context of the German government's "Industry 4.0" initiative, and the project results provide a solid foundation for implementing the German government's high-tech strategy "Innovations for Germany" in the coming years

MAVEN Deliverable 7.2: Impact Assessment - Technical Report

This deliverable focuses on an important topic within the MAVEN project - evaluation of the project impact. This is an important step that will allow us to say what the results and impact of the different technologies, functionalities as well as assumptions are. It covers different dimensions of the impact assessment as stated in the Deliverable D7.1 - Impact assessment plan [10]. The field tests proved that the technology in the vehicle works together with the infrastructure and the solution is technically feasible. This was demonstrated also during particular events and is reported in the attached test protocols. At the same time, the emulation and simulation in Dominion software proved the functionality, for example with respect to the cooperative perception or safety indicators. The tests also proved that the key performance indicator "minimum time to the collision" decreases when applying the cooperative sensing. Also, the number of human interventions needed was zero in all the tests. This deliverable also discussed selected results of a detailed user survey aiming at understanding the expected impacts and transition of automated vehicles. The overall number of respondents reached 209. The responses have revealed some interesting facts. For example, over 80% of the respondents believe that CAVs will decrease the number of traffic accidents. Similarly, about 70% of the respondents expect improvements in traffic congestions. Over 82% of respondents declared that they would accept some detour when driving if it helps the overall traffic situation. The literature review, however, indicated that autonomous vehicles will have either a positive or a negative effect on the environment, depending on the policies. For example, opening cars as a mode of transport to new user groups (seniors, children etc.) together with improvements of the traffic, flow parameters can increase the traffic volume on roads. Policy makers shall focus on the integration of the CAVs into a broader policy concept including car or ride-sharing, electromobility and others. In order to evaluate the transition, for example, the influence of different penetration rates of CAVs on the performance, a microscopic traffic simulation was performed. Here the particular MAVEN use cases, as well as their combination, was addressed. The results of the simulation are rather promising. The potential for improvements in traffic performance is clearly there. It was demonstrated that a proper integration of CAVs into city traffic management can, for example, help with respect to the environmental goals (Climate Action of the European Commission) and reduce CO2 emissions by up to 12 % (a combination of GLOSA and signal optimization). On corridors with a green wave, a capacity increase of up to 34% was achieved. The conclusions from this project can be used not only by other researchers but mainly by traffic managers and decision-makers in cities. The findings can get a better idea about the real impacts of particular use cases (such as green wave, GLOSA and others) in the cities. An important added value is also the focus on the transition phase. It was demonstrated that already for lower penetration rates (even 20% penetration of automated vehicles), there are significant improvements in traffic performance. For example, the platooning leads to a decrease of CO2 emissions of 2,6% or the impact indicator by 17,7%

Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy and Traffic Flow: Optimal Control Design and Verification Through Field Testing

This dissertation assesses eco-driving effectiveness in several key traffic scenarios that include passenger vehicle transportation in highway driving and urban driving that also includes interactions with traffic signals, as well as heavy-duty line-haul truck transportation in highway driving with significant road grade. These studies are accomplished through both traffic microsimulation that propagates individual vehicle interactions to synthesize large-scale traffic patterns that emerge from the eco-driving strategies, and through experimentation in which real prototyped connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are utilized to directly measure energy benefits from the designed eco-driving control strategies. In particular, vehicle-in-the-loop is leveraged for the CAVs driven on a physical test track to interact with surrounding traffic that is virtually realized through said microsimulation software in real time. In doing so, model predictive control is designed and implemented to create performative eco-driving policies and to select vehicle lane, as well as enforce safety constraints while autonomously driving a real vehicle. Ultimately, eco-driving policies are both simulated and experimentally vetted in a variety of typical driving scenarios to show up to a 50% boost in fuel economy when switching to CAV drivers without compromising traffic flow. The first part of this dissertation specifically assesses energy efficiency of connected and automated passenger vehicles that exploit intention-sharing sourced from both neighboring vehicles in a highway scene and from traffic lights in an urban scene. Linear model predictive control is implemented for CAV motion planning, whereby chance constraints are introduced to balance between traffic compactness and safety, and integer decision variables are introduced for lane selection and collision avoidance in multi-lane environments. Validation results are shown from both large-scale microsimulation and through experimentation of real prototyped CAVs. The second part of this dissertation then assesses energy efficiency of automated line-haul trucks when tasked to aerodynamically platoon. Nonlinear model predictive control is implemented for motion planning, and simulation and experimentation are conducted for platooning verification under highway conditions with traffic. Then, interaction-aware and intention-sharing cooperative control is further introduced to eliminate experimentally measured platoon disengagements that occur on real highways when using only status-sharing control. Finally, the performance of automated drivers versus human drivers are compared in a point-to-point scenario to verify fundamental eco-driving impacts -- experimentally showing eco-driving to boost energy economy by 11% on average even in simple driving scenarios

Validation of trajectory planning strategies for automated driving under cooperative, urban, and interurban scenarios.

149 p.En esta Tesis se estudia, diseña e implementa una arquitectura de control para vehículos automatizados de forma dual, que permite realizar pruebas en simulación y en vehículos reales con los mínimos cambios posibles. La arquitectura descansa sobre seis módulos: adquisición de información de sensores, percepción del entorno, comunicaciones e interacción con otros agentes, decisión de maniobras, control y actuación, además de la generación de mapas en el módulo de decisión, que utiliza puntos simples para la descripción de las estructuras de la ruta (rotondas, intersecciones, tramos rectos y cambios de carril)Tecnali