Experimental Conformance Evaluation onUBER ATG Safety Case Framework withANSI/UL 4600

Abstract

The safety of Self-Driving Vehicles (SDVs) is crucial for social acceptance of self-driving technology/vehicles, and how to assure such safety is of great concern for automakers and regulatory and standardization bodies. ANSI/UL 4600 (4600) [3], a standard for the safety of autonomous products, has an impact on the regulatory regime of self-driving technology/vehicles due to its detailed and well defined assurance requirements on what will be required for the safety of autonomous products. One of the major characteristics of the standard is wide-scale adoption of the safety case, which has been traditionally used for safety assurance of safety-critical systems such as railways and automobiles.

Uber ATG (now Aurora) then released its own safety case called the Safety Case Framework (SCF) [1] for their SDVs. A question arises as to how much the SCF would conform to 4600 even though the SFC does not claim its conformance with the standard. An answer to this question would result in what type of argumentation would be fit for purpose for safety assurance for SDVs and address issues with conformance assessment of a safety case with a standard.

In this paper we report on lessons we learned from an experimental analysis on the conformance ratios of the SCF with 4600 and structural analysis following the argument structure of the SCF.