Towards an extended v model to design, test and validate autonomous vehicles: a dialogue with the philosophy of technology

• Autor(a) principal: Lucas Domingues Rocha de Oliveira
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Raoni Barros Bagno, Jonathan Simões Freitas
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/53905
• topic: Autonomous vehicles; Philosophy of technology; V model; Theory of modal aspects; Theory of structures of individuality; Veículos autônomos; Administração de empresas

The autonomous vehicles (AV) have the potential to completely change the automotive market. This technology will enable reduction of accidents, pollution, energy consumption and costs associated with traffic. Furthermore, reports indicate that the autonomous vehicles will be widely adopted already in 2020. Although the application of this technology has innumerable advantages, ethical aspects like liability, AV moral decisions and social aspects like the effect on employability must be considered when designing, testing and validating these systems. Most of the testing and validation on AV today follow the classic V model, when the test cases (set of inputs and their expected outputs) derive only from technical design requirements. This could let important requirements out of the analyses and lead to significant design and test problems. In this context, the philosophy of technology can provide important tools to analyze, to have a critical view and point a direction to technology. In particular, the Dutch school of philosophy of technology has an interesting conceptual framework. The Theory of Modal Aspects (TMA) states that every entity (including technological artifacts) exists in the reality in multiple aspects. Not only technical aspects (arithmetic, spatial, kinematic, physical), but also non-technical aspects usually neglected by engineers (social, economic, juridical, moral, among others), are considered in the analysis of the entity. Second, the Theory of Structures of Individuality (TSI). In it, three functions of a technological artefact are defined to show its identity. First, the foundational function is defined, that provide which modal aspect gives the origin of the technological device. Second, the qualifying function is defined, that provide which aspect gives the context of application of the device under analyzes. Then, the operational function is defined, that provide which modal aspect gives the operation of artefact. With the origin, context of application and the operation of the AV well defined, it is possible to better understand its identity. Therefore, this paper has the objective to identify new challenges imposed by the context of autonomous to several steps in the V model. Each new challenge is compared with the possibilities derived from the philosophy of technology, in particular with theory of modal aspects and the theory of structures of individuality, identifying opportunities to propose an extended V model that would include non-technical requirements. The methodology steps are as follows. Identify an appropriate V model. Enumerate aspects in the scientific literature about the challenges of AV validation. Allocate the challenges along the steps of the V model. Identify applications of the TMA and the TSI to similar design problems. Associate the TMA and TSI contributions with the steps of the V model. Propose research action that would lead to an extended V model in near future. The preliminary results show that there is a technical bias in the designing, testing and validating of autonomous vehicles. Non-technical aspects are neglected by designers and engineers, which in turn could generate important project problems. They also show that philosophy of technology, more specifically the Dutch school of philosophy of technology, can provide important tools for analyzing AV highlighting its complexities. This analysis can lead to an extended V model with a more holistic view of the autonomous vehicles validation. The extended V model may help engineers to define more accurately all of the requirements involving the autonomous vehicles. It may also help policy makers to better propose legal requirements and standards to work as guidelines in their specific political contexts. This could help avoid design or test problems, delivering a more efficient and save product to its final client.