Session: 14-04-01: Reliability and Safety in Transportation Systems

Paper Number: 70802

Start Time: Tuesday, 10:15 AM

70802 - Safety Technology Advancements for Autonomous Cars; Prospective of Manufacturing, Regulatory and Society 

We have witnessed remarkable technology advancements and competitions in autonomous and connected vehicles. These include significant developments of self-driving electric cars by new technology development companies and by the traditional automobile manufacturers. In this rapidly changing world, cities are growing fast. With urban centers dealing with record levels of traffic and pollution, the United Nations has identified increasing urbanization as one of the defining trends of the 21st century. This growth is also causing a paradigm shift from individual vehicle ownership to the use of shared mobility options that include autonomously driven vehicles. Most of our infrastructure was built to meet the needs of individually driven cars. There is a vigorous technology development effort in the past few years to introduce self-driving smart vehicles for a connected world. If applied correctly, these technologies can enable solutions to help city transportation systems improve the economics of transportation, environmental concerns, and quality of life for everyone. The problem requires a holistic approach. While technology development has been intriguing, competitive, and vigorous, the industry’s advances on the issues of safety, risk, and reliability have been dismal. Despite its limited uses and manufacturers' stated goal of making autonomous cars demonstrably safer than an average human-controlled car, several accidents and near-misses have already occurred. The mean distance driven to an unsafe condition, near miss or accident has been far shorter than the conventional road vehicles. While the public at large is intrigued about these technologies, safety concerns are profound.

 The need for formal safety, risk, and reliability considerations in this rapidly evolving transportation technology would be critical at this point. These considerations require a convergence of related resources involving academia, autonomous vehicle industry, insurance, and associated government agencies to identify and address the relevant safety technology, policy, and regulatory development needs. Far more attention and resources for the independent safety assessment of these vehicles by the government policy and regulatory agencies would be needed to assure the safety of the public. This article will review the autonomous vehicles safety, and risk from design/manufacturing, regulatory/standards, and society/ethics prespectives. The advancements will be reviewed along the trends at development of new techniques.  The area of the focus will include: 1-Investigate and optimize the use of more redundancies in the safety equipment of driverless cars; concerns over safety, software reliability, security, hacking/misuse, and licensing are mounting. 2-Development of top-down safety requirements. 3-Reliance on more modern safety and risk-informed analytics and simulations. 4-•Avoidance of using the old safety analysis methods practiced in the conventional level-0 and level-1 vehicle technologies, and develop new out-of-the-box safety methods. 5-Uses of more redundancies in the safety equipment of driverless vehicles.  5. Evaluation of teh public and societal view toward usage of these vehicles extensively at the roads. Given insufficient formal safety, risk, and reliability considerations in this rapidly evolving transportation technology, a convergence of many related resources involving academia, autonomous vehicle industry, insurance, and associated government agencies would be desirable to identify and address the relevant technology, policy, and regulatory developments needed. Far more attention by the industry and research by the government would be necessary to close these safety gaps. 

Presenting Author: Mohammad Pourgol Mohamad University of Maryland

Authors:

Mohammad Pourgol Mohamad University of Maryland
Amin Pourgol Mohamad University of Massachusetts