The Role of Situation Awareness in Assuring Safety of Autonomous Vehicles

Assuring safety of autonomous vehicles operating in an open environment requires reliable situation awareness, action planning and prediction of actions of other vehicles and objects. Factors that also have to be considered are certainty and completeness of available information and trust in information sources and other entities. The paper discusses the problem of autonomous vehicle safety assurance and proposes dynamic situation assessment to cope with the problem of environment dynamics and incomplete and uncertain situation knowledge. The approach is presented for a simple example of a simulated autonomous vehicle. The situation awareness model and autonomous vehicle control system architecture is presented. The problems of justifying system safety are discussed.