Master Thesis (Extended Abstract) Inconsistency Management for Traffic Regulations

In modern day road traffic management, government officials are supported by software to store and visualize traffic signs and their underlying legal intentions (so-called traffic measures) on top of digital street maps. To date, however, methods are missing that help to ensure the correctness of traffic regulations. Driven by the vision of Smart Cities, this lack of tools is becoming increasingly problematic due to the rapid shift towards dynamic regulations. To fill this gap, we develop the first formal model of traffic regulations and formalize practically important use cases as reasoning tasks, including consistency evaluation, diagnosis, and different kinds of repairs. We analyze the computational complexity for different logical representation formalisms and study the relation between diagnoses and repairs. Moreover, we characterize when an inconsistent scenario can be decomposed into unrelated contexts. Finally, we also provide an easily readable and highly modular prototypical implementation using Answer Set Programming, which is both a rule-based logic and a programming paradigm.