Enhanced System Awareness as Basis for Resilience of Autonomous Vehicles

The transition to autonomous driving and increasing automation of cars requires these systems to take correct decisions in very complex situations. For this, the understanding of a vehicle system's own capabilities and the environmental context is crucial. We introduce our approach of enhancing the system awareness of vehicles to handle changes gracefully, while optimizing the overall performance. Based on a system health management the available capabilities of the distributed vehicle system can be determined. By taking into account the environment in the form of so-called operational domains at run-time, self- and context-awareness can be established providing a situation picture to which the system can adapt. We developed a service contract based solution to trigger degradations or find optimal configurations, while not endangering safety goals. Our approach is evaluated in an intersection scenario, where we can highlight the advantages of enhanced system awareness to optimize an autonomous vehicles performance.