Ontological Modeling of African Road Environments

Abstract

Sensors (camera, radar, lidar...) help Autonomous Vehicles to perceive the environment in which they move. These environments are for most of the cases, unpredictable, having a large dynamic execution context, with strong interactions. To guarantee the safety of the autonomous vehicle, its occupants and other road users, it is necessary to validate the decisions of the algorithms for all situations that will be encountered [31]. These situations depend essentially on the scenes in which the autonomous vehicles evolve. In this work, we propose an Ontological modeling of African road environments. In this context, we have defined three Ontologies: highway, weather and vehicle. The Highway Ontology and the Weather Ontology conceptualize the environment in which the autonomous vehicle evolves, and the Vehicle Ontology includes the vehicle devices. These different Ontologies were defined using the METHONTOLOGY method and the 𝐴𝐿𝐶𝑟𝑒𝑔 logical description family, and previous designed Ontologies.