Defining Risk States in Autonomous Road Vehicles

The more highly automated road vehicles become, the more complex get their control systems along with the task to identify and reach the safest possible state at an acceptably high probability in as many operational situations as possible. In this paper, we outline a modeling formalism for hazardmitigating controllers capable of run-time hazard identification and mitigation. This formalism equips the safety engineer with an incremental approach to (i) identify hazard casual factors and whole endangerment scenarios and (ii) derive operational strategies for mitigating these scenarios. We exemplify the conception of fail-safe control strategies as well as the allocation of such strategies to a control system architecture.