Formalization and Online Monitoring of Right-of-way Laws for Autonomous Vehicles at Intersections

With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving, safety concerns have become the primary barrier to its commercialization. Compliance with traffic laws is crucial for ensuring road safety. However, the current laws, formulated for human drivers, present challenges for autonomous systems due to ambiguous language description, complicating accurate judgment and government monitoring. It is imperative to transform traffic laws into machine-interpretable logical frameworks while simul-taneously resolving ambiguities in legal terminology to ensure clarity and precision. This study focuses on urban intersections, characterized by high traffic complexity and diverse participants. We propose a formalization method for right-of-way laws and develop a threshold analysis framework based on processed data from SIND, which rigorously defines the prioritization of right-of-way. The optimal compliance threshold is determined through sensitivity analysis, evaluated using the proposed Weighted TPN score (WTPNs). Meanwhile, the threshold was implemented in online monitoring at intersections. The dataset is available online via: https://github.comlSOTIF-AVLab/SinD