Operational Design Domain-Driven Coverage for the Safety Argumentation of Automated Vehicles

Automated Vehicles aim to increase road safety as automated driving systems (ADS) take over the human driving task in the operational design domain (ODD), introducing severe challenges for safety validation. Pure driving over many kilometers to gather enough evidence for a safety argument is not feasible. Scenario-based testing is an approach to overcome this, but challenges like parameter discretization still prevail, hindering safety assurance. This work proposes contributions towards a traceable and efficient safety argumentation for ADS built upon ODD coverage. First, ODD coverage is thoroughly quantified across all scenario levels, assuming distribution functions’ availability for the scenario parameters. Secondly, a sampling method for n-dimensional scenario parameter distributions is proposed. The provided algorithms adapt an initial k-means clustering using pre-defined boundary conditions requiring significantly fewer scenarios. Furthermore, a risk metric for urban intersections is presented for scenario evaluation. The risk metric consists of two parts, scene prediction of traffic participants (TPs) and risk assessment. The scene prediction uses a manoeuvre-based motion model with a data-driven approach towards trajectory prediction, increasing the validity. For the risk assessment, a probabilistic risk prediction for the TPs is performed for each scenario scene. The risk metric shows a reasonable tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity, outperforming time-to-collision. These contributions are exemplarily applied at an intersection using a simplified setup for generating TPs and ego vehicle trajectories. The results indicate that an increased safety argumentation is enabled using the proposed methods alongside a coverage process, facilitating further research.