Traffic Scenario Logic: A Spatial-Temporal Logic for Modeling and Reasoning of Urban Traffic Scenarios
Ruolin Wang, Yuejiao Xu, Jianmin Ji
TL;DR
TSL addresses the challenge of modeling urban, pedestrian-free traffic scenarios beyond highway-focused formalisms by offering a discretization-free, OpenDRIVE-compatible spatial-temporal logic. The approach defines HTSL for highways and extends to UTSL for urban networks, with formal road-network representations, rich vehicle-to-structure relations, and comprehensive rule sets enforced via ASP-based reasoning with Telingo. The authors demonstrate scenario generation across diverse urban layouts and provide pathways to practical test-case pipelines by translating TSL scenarios into OpenSCENARIO for simulators, while making the code open source. This work enables more robust testing, decision-making, and safety verification for autonomous driving in complex urban environments.
Abstract
Formal representations of traffic scenarios can be used to generate test cases for the safety verification of autonomous driving. However, most existing methods are limited to highway or highly simplified intersection scenarios due to the intricacy and diversity of traffic scenarios. In response, we propose Traffic Scenario Logic (TSL), which is a spatial-temporal logic designed for modeling and reasoning of urban pedestrian-free traffic scenarios. TSL provides a formal representation of the urban road network that can be derived from OpenDRIVE, i.e., the de facto industry standard of high-definition maps for autonomous driving, enabling the representation of a broad range of traffic scenarios without discretization approximations. We implemented the reasoning of TSL using Telingo, i.e., a solver for temporal programs based on Answer Set Programming, and tested it on different urban road layouts. Demonstrations show the effectiveness of TSL in test scenario generation and its potential value in areas like decision-making and control verification of autonomous driving. The code for TSL reasoning has been open-sourced.