Recent accidents involving autonomous vehicles prompt us to consider how we can engineer an autonomous vehicle which always obeys traffic rules. This is particularly challenging because traffic rules are rarely specified at the level of detail an engineer would expect. Hence, it is nearly impossible to formally monitor behaviours of autonomous vehicles-which are expressed in terms of position, velocity, and acceleration-with respect to the traffic rules-which are expressed by vague concepts such as "maintaining safe distance". We show how we can use the Isabelle theorem prover to do this by first codifying the traffic rules abstractly and then subsequently concretising each atomic proposition in a verified manner. Thanks to Isabelle's code generation, we can generate code which we can use to monitor the compliance of traffic rules formally.
Abstract. One barrier in introducing autonomous vehicle technology is the liability issue when these vehicles are involved in an accident. To overcome this, autonomous vehicle manufacturers should ensure that their vehicles always comply with traffic rules. This paper focusses on the safe distance traffic rule from the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. Ensuring autonomous vehicles to comply with this safe distance rule is problematic because the Vienna Convention does not clearly define how large a safe distance is. We provide a formally proved prescriptive definition of how large this safe distance must be, and correct checkers for the compliance of this traffic rule. The prescriptive definition is obtained by: 1) identifying all possible relative positions of stopping (braking) distances; 2) selecting those positions from which a collision freedom can be deduced; and 3) reformulating these relative positions such that lower bounds of the safe distance can be obtained. These lower bounds are then the prescriptive definition of the safe distance, and we combine them into a checker which we prove to be sound and complete. Not only does our work serve as a specification for autonomous vehicle manufacturers, but it could also be used to determine who is liable in court cases and for online verification of autonomous vehicles' trajectory planner.
We present the results of a friendly competition for formal verification of continuous and hybrid systems with nonlinear continuous dynamics. The friendly competition took place as part of the workshop Applied Verification for Continuous and Hybrid Systems (ARCH) in 2018. In this year, six tools CORA, CORA/SX, C2E2, Flow*, Isabelle/HOL, and SymReach (in alphabetic order) participated. They are applied to solve reachability analysis problems on four benchmarks problems, one of them with hybrid dynamics. We do not rank the tools based on the results, but show the current status and discover the potential advantages of different tools.
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