Evaluation of Different Approaches to Address Safety Validation of Automated Driving

The safety validation of automated driving for SAE level 3 and higher is still an unsolved issue. While it is generally assumed that an automated driving system should be at least as safe as a human driver, the proof of safety is currently not feasible applying approaches that are accepted for validation today. This paper gives an overview of existing approaches of safety validation from the stakeholders' perspective. Subsequently, the approaches are structured systematically, thus highlighting the simplifications they suffer from. The advantages and drawbacks of each approach are summed up. It is concluded that the issue of safety validation cannot be “solved”, as in proven mathematically with absolute certainty. The goal of the international community needs to be to design the safety validation based on state-of-the-art approaches and then examine acceptance of these approaches. The acceptance needs to be examined from all stakeholders based on the identified pros, cons, and simplifications. Hence, several risk-handling strategies are introduced to deal with the uncertain safety level resulting from necessary simplifications.