Mission-Level Runtime Assurance Framework for Autonomous Driving

Abstract

This paper studies runtime safety for autonomous driving when high-level driving commands become faulty or unreliable. Unlike conventional runtime-safety approaches that mainly focus on immediate vehicle safety, the proposed framework evaluates both driving safety and whether the vehicle can still successfully complete its mission before a command is executed. The framework extends highway-env with mission-level fault scenarios such as skipping required checkpoints, entering restricted areas, and generating future routes that can no longer complete the mission successfully. A runtime monitoring system is introduced to detect and reject unsafe or mission-infeasible commands before execution. For comparison, an adapted Simplex-Drive runtime-safety baseline with learning-based driving control, safety fallback control, and runtime controller switching is implemented using the public Simplex-Drive framework. Experimental results show that platform-level runtime safety alone cannot detect mission-level planning faults, while the proposed framework successfully rejects mission-infeasible commands and improves mission success under randomized fault conditions.