title: Accelerated Evaluation of Automated Vehicles Safety in Lane-Change Scenarios Based on Importance Sampling Techniques.
abstract: Automated vehicles (AVs) must be thoroughly evaluated before their release and deployment. A widely used evaluation approach is the Naturalistic-Field Operational Test (N-FOT), which tests prototype vehicles directly on the public roads. Due to the low exposure to safety-critical scenarios, N-FOTs are time consuming and expensive to conduct. In this paper, we propose an accelerated evaluation approach for AVs. The results can be used to generate motions of the other primary vehicles to accelerate the verification of AVs in simulations and controlled experiments. Frontal collision due to unsafe cut-ins is the target crash type of this paper. Human-controlled vehicles making unsafe lane changes are modeled as the primary disturbance to AVs based on data collected by the University of Michigan Safety Pilot Model Deployment Program. The cut-in scenarios are generated based on skewed statistics of collected human driver behaviors, which generate risky testing scenarios while preserving the statistical information so that the safety benefits of AVs in nonaccelerated cases can be accurately estimated. The cross-entropy method is used to recursively search for the optimal skewing parameters. The frequencies of the occurrences of conflicts, crashes, and injuries are estimated for a modeled AV, and the achieved accelerated rate is around 2000 to 20 000. In other words, in the accelerated simulations, driving for 1000 miles will expose the AV with challenging scenarios that will take about 2 to 20 million miles of real-world driving to encounter. This technique thus has the potential to greatly reduce the development and validation time for AVs.
authors.affiliation: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor, MI 481099 USA.
authors.forename: Ding
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA.
authors.forename: Henry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lam
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA.
authors.forename: Huei
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor, MI 481099 USA.
authors.forename: Shan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bao
authors.affiliation: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor, MI 481099 USA.
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: LeBlanc
authors.affiliation: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor, MI 481099 USA.
authors.forename: Kazutoshi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nobukawa
authors.affiliation: Division of Safety Research, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Morgantown, WV 26505 USA.
authors.forename: Christopher S
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Pan
keywords: Active safety systems; automated vehicles (AVs); autonomous emergency braking (AEB); crash avoidance; importance sampling (IS); lane change