How Safe Is Safe Enough?: Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety
Description
The most pressing question regarding autonomous vehicles is: will they be safe enough? The usual metric of "at least as safe as a human driver" is more complex than it might seem. Which human driver, under what conditions? And are fewer total fatalities OK even if it means more pedestrians die? Who gets to decide what safe enough really means when billions of dollars are on the line? And how will anyone really know the outcome will be as safe as it needs to be when the technology initially deploys without a safety driver?
This book is written by an internationally known expert with more than 25 years of experience in self-driving car safety. It covers terminology, autonomous vehicle (AV) safety challenges, risk acceptance frameworks, what people mean by "safe," setting an acceptable safety goal, measuring safety, safety cases, safety performance indicators, deciding when to deploy, and ethical AV deployment. The emphasis is not on how to build machine learning based systems, but rather on how to measure whether the result will be acceptably safe for real-world deployment. Written for engineers, policy stakeholders, and technology enthusiasts, this book tells you how to figure out what "safe enough" really means, and provides a framework for knowing that an autonomous vehicle is ready to deploy safely.
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Person
Prof. Philip Koopman is an internationally recognized expert on Autonomous Vehicle (AV) safety whose work in that area spans over 25 years. He is also actively involved with AV policy and standards as well as more general embedded system design and software quality. His pioneering research work includes software robustness testing and run time monitoring of autonomous systems to identify how they break and how to fix them. He has extensive experience in software safety and software quality across numerous transportation, industrial, and defense application domains including conventional automotive software and hardware systems. He was the principal technical contributor to the UL 4600 standard for autonomous system safety issued in 2020. He is a faculty member of the Carnegie Mellon University ECE department where he teaches software skills for mission-critical systems. In 2018 he was awarded the highly selective IEEE-SSIT Carl Barus Award for outstanding service in the public interest for his work in promoting automotive computer-based system safety. In 2022 he was named to the National Safety Council's Mobility Safety Advisory Group. He is the author of the books: Better Embedded System Software (2010), How Safe is Safe Enough: measuring and predicting autonomous vehicle safety (2022), and The UL 4600 Guidebook (2022).
