Toward Trustworthy Decision-Making for Autonomous Vehicles:A Robust Reinforcement Learning Approach with Safety Guarantees

While autonomous vehicles are vital components of intelligent transportation systems,ensuring the trustworthiness of decision-making remains a substantial challenge in realizing autonomous driving.Therefore,we present a novel robust reinforcement learning approach with safety guarantees to attain trustworthy decision-making for autonomous vehicles.The proposed technique ensures decision trustworthiness in terms of policy robustness and collision safety.Specifically,an adversary model is learned online to simulate the worst-case uncertainty by approximating the optimal adversarial perturbations on the observed states and environmental dynamics.In addition,an adversarial robust actor-critic algorithm is developed to enable the agent to learn robust policies against perturbations in observations and dynamics.Moreover,we devise a safety mask to guarantee the collision safety of the autonomous driving agent during both the training and testing processes using an interpretable knowledge model known as the Responsibility-Sensitive Safety Model.Finally,the proposed approach is evaluated through both simulations and experiments.These results indicate that the autonomous driving agent can make trustworthy decisions and drastically reduce the number of collisions through robust safety policies.

Analysis of Interchange Exit Safety Technology

In order to improve the safety of the exit of expressway interchanges,the main problems and influencing factors of interchange exits are analyzed according to the number of traffic accidents at expressway interchange exits in China.Some suggestions and countermeasures are then put forward from the aspect of safety technology for future reference.

LIFECYCLE SAFETY GUARANTEE OF STRUCTURES

The principles for lifecycle safety guarantee of engineering structures areproposed, and the conception is developed for developing the safety guarantee system by integratingthe monitoring system, analysis system and maintenance system together on the basis of multi-sensor,distribution-measurement, data fusion and digital-signal-processor (DSP) technologies as well asthree-dimensional (3D) fatigue fracture unified theory. As all the systems should work in situs andin real-time, micromation and integration are important. Damage detectability is introduced toclarify the relationship of life prediction and healthy monitoring or faulty diagnosis. The researchwork to realize the lifecycle safety guarantee system is summarized and perspectives for futureefforts are outlined.

Discussion on the Safe and Guaranteed Access of Interchange Widening in Reconstruction and Extension of Highway

In the process of reconstruction and extension of highways,the most important thing is to ensure that the overall level of the widening of interchanges is comprehensively improved to ensure safe traffic.However,due to the heavy and difficult tasks in the widening of interchanges,higher requirements are put forward for the construction quality of the project.In the actual construction of the project,it is necessary to actively analyze and explain the specific construction of the interchange widening project to ensure that the improvement level of the interchange widening in highway reconstruction and extension project is effectively upgraded.This paper gives a detailed introduction to the main construction technology for interchange widening project,clarifies the technical points of safety and guaranteed access,and proposes corresponding safeguard measures to ensure the comprehensive upgrade of the construction quality and standard of interchange widening in highway reconstruction and extension.

Demonstration Project of Safe and Efficient Mining Operations in Extra-thick Coal Seam

Mineable coal reserves in thick and extra-thick seams account for 44% of the total deposit in China. Fullymechanized top-coal caving technology is a new mining method of safe and efficient underground operations in extra-thick seams in China. The development of fullymechanized top-coal caving technology in China, which was successfully applied in Face 8105 in Tashan Coal Mine, Datong, Shanxi, China, is analyzed in this paper.Studies on movement pattern of top-coal and roof from fully-mechanized top caving face in 14–20 m extra-thick seams have been carried out. A series of key technologies were successfully developed, including strata control technology, equipment for high-efficient and high-recovery top caving operations, and safety guarantee technology for low gas occurrence and high gas emission. As a result, the fully-mechanized top-coal caving Face 8105, with large mining height in Tashan Coal Mine, has achieved a recovery rate of 88.9% and an average equipment operation rate of 92.1%. With coal production of 10.84 Mt in 2011,the demonstration project is a technology and equipment breakthrough for fully-mechanized top-coal caving face in extra-thick coal seams with large mining height.