01557639

Component

https://doi.org/10.3141/2489-15

Traffic engineers, vehicle manufacturers, technology groups, and government agencies are anticipating and preparing for the emergence of fully automated vehicles into the American transportation system. This new technology has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of transportation, particularly safety. However, fully automated vehicles may not create the truly crash-free environment predicted. One particular problem is crash assignment, especially between automated vehicles and nonautomated vehicles. Although some researchers have indicated that automated vehicles will need to be programmed with some sort of ethical system in order to make decisions on how to crash, few, if any, studies have been conducted on how particular ethical theories will actually make crash decisions and how these ethical paradigms will affect automated vehicle programming. The integration of three ethical theories—utilitarianism, respect for persons, and virtue ethics—with vehicle automation is examined, and a simple programming thought experiment is used to demonstrate the difficulty in selecting and implementing different ethical decisions. A simple crash scenario is introduced; an automated vehicle must choose between three crash types on the basis of a randomly assigned ethical theory. The results of the experiment indicate that in specific crash scenarios, utilitarian ethics may reduce the total number of fatalities that result from automated vehicle crashes, although other ethical systems may be useful for developing rules used in machine learning. The experiment demonstrates that understanding rational ethics is crucial for developing safe automated vehicles.

01595098

15-4405

English

pp 130–136

2015

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

9780309369572

Print

Figures (1) ; References (28) ; Tables (1)

Autonomous vehicle guidance; Computer programming; Decision making; Ethics; Highway safety; Intelligent vehicles; Traffic crashes

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:27PM

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• Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control: Definitions and Operating Concepts
• Deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems in South East Europe: Current Status and Future Prospects
• Design and Implementation of Integrated Network Management Methodology in a Regional Network
• Development of California Regulations to Govern Testing and Operation of Automated Driving Systems
• Empirical Longitudinal Driving Behavior in Authority Transitions Between Adaptive Cruise Control and Manual Driving
• Evaluation and Sign-Off Methodology for Automated Vehicle Systems Based on Relevant Driving Situations
• Freeway Short-Term Travel Time Prediction Based on Dynamic Tensor Completion
• In-Car Advice to Reduce Negative Effects of Phantom Traffic Jams
• Localization and Driving Behavior Classification with Smartphone Sensors in Direct Absence of Global Navigation Satellite Systems
• Novel Algorithm for Variable Speed Limits and Advisories for a Freeway Corridor with Multiple Bottlenecks
• Observe-Driver-and-Learn Platform for Relevance Estimation in Safety Warning Applications from Vehicular Ad Hoc Network
• Platoon-Based Speed Control Algorithm for Ecodriving at Signalized Intersection
• Robust and Efficient Broadcast Scheme of Event-Driven Warning Messages for Vehicular Environments
• Safe Integration of Fully Automated Road Transport Systems in Urban Environments: Basis for Missing Legal Framework
• Where Is My Parking Spot? Online and Offline Prediction of Time-Varying Parking Occupancy