The typical AV accident scenarios in the urban area obtained by clustering and association rule mining of real-world accident reports

Abstract

Automated Vehicles (AVs) based on a collection of advanced technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence have opened an opportunity to reduce traffic accidents caused by human drivers. Nevertheless, traffic accidents of AVs continue to occur, which raises safety and reliability concerns about AVs. AVs are particularly vulnerable to accidents on urban roads than on highways due to various dynamic objects and more complex infrastructure. Several studies proposed a scenario-based approach of experimenting with the response of AVs to specific situations as a way to test their safety. Reliable and concrete scenarios are necessary to test AV safety under critical conditions accurately. This study aims to derive a typical accident scenario for evaluating the safety of AVs, specifically in urban areas, by analysing collisions reported by the DMV of California, USA. We applied a hierarchical clustering method to find groups of similar reports and then executed association rule mining on each cluster to correlate between accident factors and collision types. We combined statistically significant association rules to constitute a total of 14 scenarios that are described according to an adapted PEGASUS framework. The newly obtained scenarios exhibit significantly different accident patterns than the typical Human-driven Vehicles (HVs) in urban areas reported by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Our discovery urges AV safety to be tested reliably under scenarios more relevant than the existing HV accident scenarios.

Keywords

• Automated vehicles
• Safety evaluation
• Typical accident scenarios
• Real-world data