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Fakultät für Informatik

Zhijing Zhu defends Doctoral Dissertation

Das Bild zeigt Zhijing Zhu mit den vier Professoren der Promotionskommision. © Privat
Zhijing Zhu successfully defended her dissertation project on difficult environmental conditions of automated driving systems (ADS).

Automated driving systems (ADS) operate in the dynamic open environment. Verifying their safety relies on testing them in representative and safety-relevant scenarios.
To comprehensively define such scenarios and especially critical ones, it is important to analyze how ADS and their components could be exposed to a hazard in their operational environment at first. Three dimensions should be thoroughly understood and utilized, namely the operational environment, the functions and components of ADS, and potential hazardous behaviors of ADS. More specifically, it needs to be considered what the environment consists of, how it can be structured, and which environmental conditions can be an external root cause for ADS to not operate safely. Meanwhile, it is of importance to analyze what components ADS consist of and in which ways these can be affected. Finally, the possible hazardous behaviors ADS can perform should be investigated to derive and estimate corresponding risks. 
Accordingly, Zhijing Zhu proposed the concept of difficult environmental conditions in her dissertation to cascade the three aforementioned dimensions. As the main contributions of her dissertation, she developed methods to formalize, identify, and test difficult environmental conditions for verifying the safety of ADS. The dissertation is based on a selection of Zhijing's publications on this topic.