ABZ 2025 – 11th International Conference on Rigorous State Based Methods

Case Study: Safety Controller for Autonomous Driving - Call for Papers

As successfully practiced in previous editions of ABZ, the 11th edition of ABZ will include again special sessions dedicated to a shared real-life case study.

The objective of this session is to enrich the set of case studies ( https://abz-conf.org/case-studies/) developed with Rigorous State Based Methods with a practical and real-life case study. Its goal is also cross-fertilisation, enabling practitioners of the individual formal methods to better understand each other.

The case study is about a safety controller for autonomous driving on a highway. The description contains two variations of the case study. First, in the simpler setting, we just consider a single-lane highway where each vehicle can accelerate and brake. The goal is to keep a safe distance to the preceding car. Second, we consider a multi-lane highway where each vehicle can also change lanes.

The challenge is to model the system and its environment, and to derive assumptions and model a controller for which the safety can be guaranteed. The challenge is also to present the safety case in such a way that it is convincing to readers not entirely familiar with the formal method employed.

The case study is designed such that the formal model can be used as a safety shield within a highway simulation environment. We provide pre-trained unsafe AI agents, which can be used to experiment with. This part of the case study is optional.

All the pdf versions of the specification document are available here (we keep track of all the changes in the documents): https://github.com/hhu-stups/abz2025_casestudy_autonomous_driving/tree/main/case_study The current version is v1 of the specification document.

All the questions and doubts can be discussed here: https://github.com/hhu-stups/abz2025_casestudy_autonomous_driving/issues

If you have any question/comment on the case study, you can contact:

ABZ 2025 invites:

  • Case study papers: Full papers reporting on the experiments conducted with any of the state based techniques in the scope of ABZ 2025 case study. A paper of no more than 16 pages (excluding references) in LNCS format is expected and will be reviewed.

Accepted papers will appear in the Springer LNCS proceedings.

Submission Process

Authors should consult Springer’s authors' guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. In addition, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the files have been sent to Springer, changes relating to the authorship of the papers cannot be made.

Authors interested in contributing to ABZ 2025 in Open Access or Open Choice should refer to the corresponding Springer webpage.

Important Dates

Abstract submission (mandatory): February 3, 2025
Paper submission (including research/short/industry/journal-first papers): February 10, 2025
Notification: March 29, 2025
Final version: April 9, 2025