The KARYON project: Predictable and safe coordination in cooperative vehicular systems

KARYON, a kernel-based architecture for safety-critical control, is a European project that proposes a new perspective to improve performance of smart vehicle coordination. The key objective of KARYON is to provide system solutions for predictable and safe coordination of smart vehicles that autonomously cooperate and interact in an open and inherently uncertain environment. One of the main challenges is to ensure high performance levels of vehicular functionality in the presence of uncertainties and failures. This paper describes some of the steps being taken in KARYON to address this challenge, from the definition of a suitable architectural pattern to the development of proof-of-concept prototypes intended to show the applicability of the KARYON solutions. The project proposes a safety architecture that exploits the concept of architectural hybridization to define systems in which a small local safety kernel can be built for guaranteeing functional safety along a set of safety rules. KARYON is also developing a fault model and fault semantics for distributed, continuous-valued sensor systems, which allows abstracting specific sensor faults and facilitates the definition of safety rules in terms of quality of perception. Solutions for improved communication predictability are proposed, ranging from network inaccessibility control at lower communication levels to protocols for assessment of cooperation state at the process level. KARYON contributions include improved simulation and fault-injection tools for evaluating safety assurance according to the ISO 26262 safety standard. The results will be assessed using selected use cases in the automotive and avionic domains.

I. Introduction

The constantly increasing traffic density on the roads puts substantial challenges to society. Because it is not possible to just build new roads at the same pace as traffic increases or extend the airspace, traffic throughput has to be improved. One way to increase throughput is to enable the cooperation between vehicles to allow information sharing, prospective planning and tight manoeuvre synchronization between vehicles beyond human reaction capabilities. The importance of the problem finds echo in large programs for car-to-car and car-to-roadside communication that have been launched on the national and European level by the car industry¹

A list of current project is available on the CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium (http://www.car-to-car.org/index.php?id=6)

. The benefit from this vehicle cooperation firstly comes from extending the perception of the environment dramatically. E.g. an obstacle warning system can look miles ahead, prospective trajectory planning can detect possible conflicts far ahead using the information from other planes or a central data repository as in SESAR²

http://www.sesarju.eu/about

. Additionally, new opportunities can be explored, such as extensive driver assistance systems that today are based on autonomous environment perception (and allowed only in very constraint mission contexts), which may greatly benefit from extended cooperation options.