Dilemma of Responsibility-Sensitive Safety in Longitudinal Mixed Autonomous Vehicles Flow: A Human-Driver-Error-Tolerant Driving Strategy

Abstract

The safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is a critical consideration for their widespread adoption. Responsibility sensitive safety (RSS) is proposed to serve as a model checking tool for AV safety. However, RSS alone cannot guarantee safety when they are mixed with human-driven vehicles (HDVs). These HDVs may disregard safety rules, creating dilemmas for AVs where they must choose between crashing into their leader or crashing into their follower. This manuscript defines this dilemma regarding the longitudinal driving and extends it to platooning scenarios with an arbitrary number of vehicles, referred to as polylemma. In polylemma, a violation of safety rules by one vehicle inevitably results in at least one crash between neighboring vehicles. To avoid the polylemma scenario, the manuscript proposes a human error-tolerant (HET) driving strategy, wherein AVs maintain an additional gap and prepare for moderate deceleration to account for potential errors by human drivers. The manuscript derives the risk reduction and capacity variation resulting from the implementation of this strategy at a given market penetration rate (MPR) using real world trajectory data. The analysis indicates that a 50% MPR would reduce risks due to human error by 80%, with a decrease in capacity which vary different for background traffic flow speed.