Assuring Fully Autonomous Vehicles Safety by Design: The Autonomous Vehicle Control (AVC) Module Strategy

Massive investment in 'intelligent' vehicle technologies is going to turn autonomous vehicles into reality in a few years. The insertion of this intelligence at the road vehicles is expected to cause a reduction in traffic accidents due to the mitigation of human drivers errors and imperfections by computerized autopilots. However, autonomous vehicles shall mitigate the existing hazards at the roadway transportation systems while not creating new hazards. Thus, some critical aspects need to be better considered, such as how to ensure safety in this new vehicle paradigm. There is no specific method to analyze and assure the safety levels of the autonomous vehicle system. Despite the ISO 26262 - a new safety standard that specifies requirements and activities throughout the road vehicles development lifecycle - it cannot be applied to the autonomous road vehicles scope. This paper proposes a design strategy that may be used at the architecture design level of autonomous vehicles that may facilitate the development, analysis and, consequently, safety level assuring. The main idea is to implement an independent module - the Autonomous Vehicle Control (AVC) - that is going to both interact with the vehicle's systems and create a protection layer that is independent of the way the vehicle's system was developed. So, the AVC could be used with any autonomous vehicle system and could be tested individually. This strategy is based on both recommended practices published by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and on approaches used on other transportation system domains. Another important point is that the proposed module will be intended, in principle, for fully autonomous cars (high levels of driving automation). So, it is expected that, in the future, the proposed module can be used to develop a safety software standard or to suit the existing ones to the needs of autonomous road vehicles.