Safe Driving Capacity of Autonomous Vehicles

An excellent self-driving car is expected to take its passengers safely and efficiently from one place to another. However, different ways of defining safety and efficiency may significantly affect the conclusion we make. In this paper, we give formal definitions to the safe state of a road and safe state of a vehicle using the syntax of linear temporal logic (LTL). We then propose the concept of safe driving throughput (SDT) and safe driving capacity (SDC) which measure the amount of vehicles in the safe state on a road. We analyze how SDT is affected by different factors. We show the analytic difference of SDC between the road with perception-based vehicles (PBV) and the road with cooperative-based vehicles (CBV). We claim that through proper design, the SDC of the road filled with PBVs will be upper-bounded by the SDC of the road filled with CBVs.