A Context-Aware, Confidence-Disclosing and Fail-Operational Dynamic Risk Assessment Architecture

Abstract

Future automotive systems will be highly automated and they will cooperate to optimize important system qualities and performance. Established safety assurance approaches and standards have been designed with manually controlled stand-alone systems in mind and are thus not fit to ensure safety of this next generation of systems. We argue that, given frequent dynamic changes and unknown contexts, systems need to be enabled to dynamically assess and manage their risks. In doing so, systems become resilient from a safety perspective, i.e. they are able to maintain a state of acceptable risk even when facing changes. This work presents a Dynamic Risk Assessment architecture that implements the concepts of context-awareness, confidence-disclosure and fail-operational. In particular, we demonstrate the utilization of these concepts for the calculation of automotive collision risk metrics, which are at the heart of our architecture.