When Is an Automated Driving System Safe Enough for Deployment on the Public Road? Quantifying Safety Risk Using Real-World Scenarios

To ensure the safe and responsible deployment of vehicles equipped with Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) onto the public road, a safety assessment of such vehicles should be passed successfully. The assessment results should be unambiguous, easily understood by experts in the field, and explainable to authorities and the general public. An important metric in such a framework is the residual safety risk. The concept of risk is widely understood, and basing the safety assessment on that concept helps to come to a fair and acceptable assessment process. In this paper, we propose a method how to determine estimates for the residual safety risk, and how this safety risk estimate relates to the requirements posed by the UNECE that an activated ADS shall not cause any collisions that are reasonably foreseeable and preventable.