ABSTRACT
Risk analysis is very useful for identifying hazardous events affecting the functional limits of complex systems as autonomous vehicles. To ensure the robustness of an autonomous vehicle architecture, new approaches should be investigated providing the dimensioning parameters related to functional scenarios. Research is currently ongoing at the VEDECOM Institute to identify and analyze safety critical situations including accidents. For this reason, a set of functional scenarios has been defined as an abstraction of real life driving situations. The aim is to explore how autonomous vehicles evolve and behave under various environmental and traffic conditions. Thus, this paper presents a qualitative risk analysis approach taking into account the evolution of a scenario by means of the concept of transition between successive scenes. Then, combinations of hazards are identified potentially leading to safety critical situations. Finally, the feasibility of our proposal is shown on an application case examining a level 4 autonomous vehicle behavior in high traffic driving.
