Last year Springer published Road Vehicle Automation 10, part of their Lecture Notes in Mobility book series. Written by a global group of researchers, engineers and analysts, the book offers a set of multidisciplinary perspectives on the opportunities and challenges associated with automating road transportation. 

Our CTO Erik Antonsson wrote one of the chapters, titled Surrogate Measures of Automated Vehicle Safety. Here is the abstract:

Surrogate measures of traffic safety replace collision statistics as a means of assessing the safety of a roadway, intersection, vehicle, or mobility system. Effective and consistent surrogate measures of traffic risk and safety that will be useful to ADS stakeholders — including AV developers, traffic infrastructure developers and managers, regulators, legislators, and the public — will have a number of essential characteristics, including monotonicity and scalability.

Trailing indicators, such as collision statistics, are a poor methodology for improving safety, In addition, the use of trailing indicators incurs pain and loss on society, and is not an ethically acceptable approach. Leading indicators, based on non-collision interactions, include: Traffic Conflicts, Time-to-Collision (TTC), Post-Encroachment Time (PET), Instantaneous Safety Metric (ISM), harsh accelerations and turns (generally measured by an inertial measurement unit (IMU)), AV Control System Disengagements, and near-misses or near-crash events.

Surrogate measures, reviewed here, gather, process, and in some cases predict traffic movement, or control system behavior, and produce a (sometimes quantitative) score reflecting the riskiness or safeness of the behavior of vehicles in traffic.

Erik's chapter is now available for download in our Publications page.

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And if you are interested in more information, please do get in touch.

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Original photo by Ahmed Almakhzanji on Unsplash

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