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Welcome to Toyota Research Institute's Open Source Safety MBSE project!

Here we build reference models of the real world driving environment that are both platform independent and executable. For more information please see the Medium blog post announcing our project.

If you are new to Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) or curious as to how we are applying MBSE principles to projects within TRI, watch this video.

Another good start before diving in is the series of short videos listed at the bottom of the Road Subsystem overview page.

If you want to go straight to the model content, start here for a content overview.

The Vehicle Guidance Domain

The entire model set is enclosed under what we call the Vehicle Guidance Domain. In our language (Executable UML) a 'domain' characterizes a consistent level of abstraction. Vehicle Guidance is concerned with real world things (both static and dynamic) in the driving environment that influence driving choices and behavior. Lane divisions on the road, for example, influence where a vehicle should (and should not) be driving. In general, the immediate driving environment constrains and influences the driver's options.

Modeling the real world driving environment

By modeling this environment we not only establish safe driving choices, we identify unsafe options as well. A soft lane division whose Cross OK attribute is set to true may be crossed safely (traffic permitting) while a hard lane division (physical barrier) may not be safely traversed. This one is fairly obvious, but as we build the models we frequently uncover subtle, but significant, edge cases.

Subsystem breakdown

The Vehicle Guidance Domain is partitioned into a set of interconnected subsystems. Some of these have been modeled and included in this release, some are modeled and soon to be released while others are planned. Our focus has been on the fundamental driving elements so that we can combine them, like semantic legos, to define more complex structures.

Open source collaboration

One of the reasons that we open-sourceing our modeling effort is to encourage collaboration so that we can make faster progress across the currently unmodeleled elements of the driving environment. We're starting out small, but we look forward to scaling up through community collaboration. Feel free to initiate dialog in our discussion group if you have questions, comments or wish to collaborate on some level.

Our modeling language

The models are developed using Executable UML (Unified Modeling Language). It is a mature modeling language supported by a variety of open source tools. Whereas 'UML' refers only to diagram notation, our particular usage (modeling process, execution semantics, etc) has its roots in the Shlaer-Mellor methodology. We'll do our best in this wiki to explain the language enough for model review, but if you want to dive deep we've provided a list of resources.