Online Decision-Making for Scalable Autonomous Systems

We present a general formal model called MODIA that can tackle a central challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs), namely the ability to interact with an unspecified, large number of world entities. In MODIA, a collection of possible decisionproblems (DPs), known a priori, are instantiated online and executed as decision-components (DCs), unknown a priori. To combine the individual action recommendations of the DCs into a single action, we propose the lexicographic executor action function (LEAF) mechanism. We analyze the complexity of MODIA and establish LEAF’s relation to regret minimization. Finally, we implement MODIA and LEAF using collections of partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) DPs, and use them for complex AV intersection decision-making. We evaluate the approach in six scenarios within a realistic vehicle simulator and present its use on an AV prototype.