Safety risk assessment for autonomous vehicle road testing.

Objective: Road testing can accelerate the development and validation of autonomous vehicles (AVs). AV road testing can come with high safety risks, particularly in a complex road traffic environment, due to the immaturity of AV technology. A priori safety risk assessments of the road traffic environment before AV road testing are of great importance, allow the quantifying of risk levels in different road scenarios, and provide guidelines for AV road testing in low to high-risk environments.

Methods: This study proposes a framework, namely Safety Risk Assessment for AV road testing (SRAAV), based on the probability and severity of five categories of potential AV accidents. Four groups of influencing factors are considered comprehensively in assessing AV safety risk, and their impacts are quantified using impact coefficients derived from a Bayesian network and empirical AV road testing data. The safety risk is assessed on a road section level, based on which an overall risk level is defined for a corridor and a region. Afterwards, the quantified safety risk is classified into four levels according to expert experience and knowledge, through a questionnaire survey.

Results: Applications of the proposed SRAAV framework are conducted for urban roads in Shanghai, and expressways in Shanghai and Gothenburg. The assessment results are validated using disengagement data from AV road testing. The results show that the SRAAV framework and its models could estimate the safety risk levels of road traffic environments for AV road testing in a sound way and have the flexibility for further extensions to be made.

Conclusions: The framework and assessment results can provide technical support for determining where and when to grant permission for public roads to be used for AV road testing, and how to choose public roads from a low to a high risk level, guaranteeing the safety of AV public road testing.