Proceedings of the 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023)
Edited by Mário P. Brito, Terje Aven, Piero Baraldi, Marko Čepin and Enrico Zio
©2023 ESREL2023 Organizers. Published by Research Publishing, Singapore.
doi: 10.3850/978-981-18-8071-1_P326-cd
Safety hazard identification of inspection and maintenance operations for Automated
Driving Systems in Mobility as a Service
Camila Correa-Jullian
1,2
, John McCullough
1
, Marilia Ramos
2
, Ali Mosleh
2
, Jiaqi Ma
2,3
1
Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. E-mail:
ccorreaj@ucla.edu
2
B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, USA E-mail:
marilia.ramos@ucla.edu , mosleh@ucla.edu
3
Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. E-mail:
jiaqima@ucla.edu
Cooperative decision-making between humans and automated agents operating at various levels of autonomy (LoA)
is an increasing trend observed across multiple industries and research areas. Assessing emerging properties and
unintended behaviors in complex engineering systems is key to developing policies to prevent and mitigate risks
during operation stages. An aspect often overlooked in analyses of autonomous system operation is developing and
enforcing adequate inspection and maintenance policies. In this work, the Concurrent Task Analysis (CoTA) method
is used to analyze the operation of a Level 4 Automated Driving System (L4 ADS) fleet employed for Mobility as
a Service (MaaS). The method is employed to define tasks and responsibilities key to supporting the safe operation
of the ADS vehicles based on a functional breakdown of the system, the development of operational scenarios, and
the identification of safety hazards. The CoTA describes the interaction between distinct fleet operator agents (e.g.,
fleet monitoring and vehicle maintenance), identifies critical tasks, and traces cascading and latent failures between
them. This paper presents the CoTA of the inspection and maintenance operational phases and discusses the safety
implications on the fleet operator’s safety responsibilities to ensure adequate operation of the ADS fleet.
Keywords: Concurrent task analysis, automated driving systems, safety assessments, mobility as a service,
inspection and maintenance procedures.
1. Introduction
Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) vehicles are
poised to transform the transportation landscape
in the future. The Society of Automotive
Engineers (SAE) establishes six levels of vehicle
automation. Level 5 represents a fully self-driving
vehicle that operates without human intervention
and is unrestricted in its operational range. Level
4 (L4) ADS, on the other hand, can perform all
Dynamic Driving Tasks (DDT) within a
designated Operational Design Domain (ODD)
and may require human input under certain
conditions (SAE International, 2021). Vehicles
equipped with L4 ADS are becoming
commercially available in the context of Mobility
as a Service (MaaS). Companies such as Waymo
and Cruise are some of the leading companies in
the U.S. in terms of developing, testing, and
deploying these vehicles.
Amid the currently evolving technical,
commercial, and regulatory environment, using L4
ADS for MaaS raises questions about how
developers and fleet operators may provide
adequate safety assurance prior to widespread
commercialization and deployment. Recent
incident reports collected from testing and small-
scale deployment imply that a more focused
approach on operational safety is required, for
instance, to avoid traffic disruptions, or to
determine appropriate incident management
procedures (National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, 2022). The latter may become an
important element when scaling operations where
passengers are on-board a vehicle with no safety
driver.
In general, efforts in assessing the safety of
ADS vehicles have focused either on aspects of
functional safety and component-level reliability,
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