Lounis Adouane

Yujia Lu, Chong Wei, Lu Ma et al.

Autonomous highway driving involves high-speed safety risks due to limited reaction time, where rare but dangerous events may lead to severe consequences. This places stringent requirements on trajectory planning in terms of both reliability and computational efficiency. This paper proposes a hybrid highway trajectory planning (H-HTP) framework that integrates learning-based adaptability with optimization-based formal safety guarantees. The key design principle is a deliberate division of labor: a learning module generates a traffic-adaptive velocity profile, while all safety-critical decisions including collision avoidance and kinematic feasibility are delegated to a Mixed-Integer Quadratic Program (MIQP). This design ensures that formal safety constraints are always enforced, regardless of the complexity of multi-vehicle interactions. A linearization strategy for the vehicle geometry substantially reduces the number of integer variables, enabling real-time optimization without sacrificing formal safety guarantees. Experiments on the HighD dataset demonstrate that H-HTP achieves a scenario success rate above 97% with an average planning-cycle time of approximately 54 ms, reliably producing smooth, kinematically feasible, and collision-free trajectories in safety-critical highway scenarios.

Dimia Iberraken, Lounis Adouane

The growing advancements in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have emphasized the critical need to prioritize the absolute safety of AV maneuvers, especially in dynamic and unpredictable environments or situations. This objective becomes even more challenging due to the uniqueness of every traffic situation/condition. To cope with all these very constrained and complex configurations, AVs must have appropriate control architectures with reliable and real-time Risk Assessment and Management Strategies (RAMS). These targeted RAMS must lead to reduce drastically the navigation risks. However, the lack of safety guarantees proves, which is one of the key challenges to be addressed, limit drastically the ambition to introduce more broadly AVs on our roads and restrict the use of AVs to very limited use cases. Therefore, the focus and the ambition of this paper is to survey research on autonomous vehicles while focusing on the important topic of safety guarantee of AVs. For this purpose, it is proposed to review research on relevant methods and concepts defining an overall control architecture for AVs, with an emphasis on the safety assessment and decision-making systems composing these architectures. Moreover, it is intended through this reviewing process to highlight researches that use either model-based methods or AI-based approaches. This is performed while emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of each methodology and investigating the research that proposes a comprehensive multi-modal design that combines model-based and AI approaches. This paper ends with discussions on the methods used to guarantee the safety of AVs namely: safety verification techniques and the standardization/generalization of safety frameworks.