No More Traffic Tickets: A Tutorial to Ensure Traffic-Rule Compliance of Automated Vehicles

Abstract

Imagine an automated vehicle violating a traffic rule and, by that, causing an accident. This would not only be devastating for a responsible operator, but more importantly, each such incident would erode the trust of the public in automated vehicles. Fortunately, compliance with traffic rules can be fully controlled, unless other traffic participants breach them—this causality obviously makes it possible for responsible operators to avoid liability claims. Traffic rules can be seen as guardrails for automated driving and should take center stage. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case. Many traffic rules are typically implicitly embedded in various fragments of the software stack of automated vehicles. Instead, the considered traffic rules should be explicitly and centrally provided. Adherence to traffic rules should also be ensured by formal methods to gain the trust needed in the public. This article provides all the steps required to achieve this goal. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this topic (law, engineering, and computer science), we aim to address a broad audience by focusing on the governing principles of the presented methods, and we refer to more technical works for details.