Investigating Accident Preventability via Evasive Lane-Change Maneuvers, a Candidate Safety Reference Model

Vehicles equipped with Automated Driving Systems (ADS) are eventually making their first steps into the market as of the recent regulations enabling both SAE J3016 L3 and L4 to be operated on public roads in a limited Operation Design Domain (ODD). The gradual adoption of ADS featured vehicles poses questions concerning the feasibility of traditional safety validation approaches to generate sufficient safety evidence to cover the operational space of such technologies. One method that is suggested in the recent UNECE Regulation 157 for the Automated Lane Keeping System (ALKS) is to use safety models to establish a performance benchmark for the ADS to securely address traffic scenarios potentially leading to rear-end collisions. However, such models only encompass the braking action as a means to reduce the collision risk in case of critical scenarios whereas evasive lateral maneuvers are not taken into consideration. Building upon this research gap, the present manuscript studies the effectiveness of evasive lane-change maneuvers in addressing UN-R157 safety-critical scenarios by extending one of the proposed safety reference models to accommodate for the steering action. Overall, the introduction of evasive lane-change into safety reference models results in more ambitious benchmarks, especially for rear-end potential collisions with a large speed difference.