Introducing connectivity and collaboration promises to address some of the safety
challenges for automated vehicles (AVs), especially in scenarios where
occlusions and rule-violating road users pose safety risks and challenges in
reconciling performance and safety.
This requires establishing new collaborative systems with connected vehicles,
off-board perception systems, and a communication network. However, adding
connectivity and information sharing not only requires infrastructure
investments but also an improved understanding of the design space, the involved
trade-offs and new failure modes.
We set out to improve the understanding of the relationships between the
constituents of a collaborative system to investigate design parameters
influencing safety properties and their performance trade-offs. To this end we
propose a methodology comprising models, analysis methods, and a software tool
for design space exploration regarding the potential for safety enhancements and
requirements on off-board perception systems, the communication network, and AV
tactical safety behavior. The methodology is instantiated as a concrete set of
models and a tool, exercised through a case study involving intersection traffic
conflicts.
We show how the age of information and observation uncertainty affect the
collaborative system design space and further discuss the generalization and
other findings from both the methodology and case study development.
