IEEE to develop safety benchmark for automated vehicles

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently approved a proposal for developing a new benchmark for safety in automated vehicle (AV) decision-making. Intel is inviting companies across the world to participate in this workgroup, which will be led by Intel’s Senior Principal Engineer Jack Weast. All the firms dealing with automated vehicles can come and join this workshop. The first meeting of this group is slated to be held in the first quarter of 2020.

Jack Weast, senior principal engineer at Intel.

Why is this workshop important?
Regulators and industry players are striving hard to agree with a single process for evaluation of safety and security in AV. Most users and people totally agree that new and better standards are required to establish new regulatory thresholds that reward the AVs drivers with driving license. There are a number of approaches being taken in this direction.

How does it work?
The latest IEEE 2846 standard will set up a formal rules-based mathematical model for automated vehicle decision-making. It will be a formally verifiable, flexible, and technologically neutral benchmark. Regional and local governments will be able to customize it. The new benchmark will also include test tools and methodology that will for certification of an AV to examine conformance with the standard.

What Is Intel’s role?
Intel brings-in its RSS (Responsibility-Sensitive Safety) framework as the initial point where the industry can align with new safety benchmark. RSS is both technology-neutral and open which means it defines the safety of machine driving better than all others. It will accomplish it with a complete set of logically provable rules and prescribed accurate responses to precarious situations. It also formalizes the human safe driving notions in mathematical formats.

What do the makers say?
Jack Weast, Intel’s senior principal engineer, explains: “The forthcoming IEEE standard will provide a useful tool to answer the question of what it means for an AV to drive safely.”

Also, the VP of Standard Activities at IEEE Computer Society, Riccardo Mariani, says, “This standardization project will provide an important basis for the development of open, formal models in automated vehicle decision-making. Redundancy and diversity are crucial to developing scalable frameworks for sale automated driving.”