Legal Decision-Making for Highway Automated Driving

Compliance with traffic laws is a fundamental requirement for human drivers on the road, and autonomous vehicles must adhere to traffic laws as well. However, current autonomous vehicles prioritize safety and collision avoidance primarily in their decision-making and planning, which will lead to misunderstandings and distrust from human drivers and may even result in accidents in mixed traffic flow. Therefore, ensuring the compliance of the autonomous driving decision-making system is essential for ensuring the safety of autonomous driving and promoting the widespread adoption of autonomous driving technology. To this end, the paper proposes a trigger-based layered compliance decision-making framework. This framework utilizes the decision intent at the highest level as a signal to activate an online violation monitor that identifies the type of violation committed by the vehicle. Then, a four-layer architecture for compliance decision-making is employed to generate compliant trajectories. Using this system, autonomous vehicles can detect and correct potential violations in real-time, thereby enhancing safety and building public confidence in autonomous driving technology. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated on the DJI AD4CHE highway dataset under four typical highway scenarios: speed limit, following distance, overtaking, and lane-changing. The results indicate that the proposed method increases the vehicle's overall compliance rate from 13.85% to 84.46%, reduces the proportion of active violations to 0%, and only slightly decreases the vehicle's traffic efficiency by 2.7%, demonstrating its effectiveness.