Challenges in Achieving Explainability for Cooperative Transportation Systems

The anticipated presence of highly automated vehicles and intelligent infrastructure systems in urban traffic will yield new types of demand-driven mobility and value-added services. To provide these services, future transportation systems will consist of large-scale, cooperative ensembles of highly automated and connected systems that operate in mixed traffic and have to interact with human drivers and vulnerable road users while coordinately ensuring traffic efficiency and safety. We posit that the ability to explain processes and decisions is essential for such systems. Adequately addressing the needs of the involved actors will require that explainability and trust-worthiness are handled as core properties in the development of highly automated systems. To support explainability-driven design approaches, we identify a set of explainability challenges in the context of a large-scale ongoing endeavor on cooperative transportation and present approaches to target these challenges.