Lishan Yang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University, received funding for the project: “Collaborative Research: Elements: MELIOREM: An Integrated Evaluation Cyberinfrastructure towards Safe and Dependable Autonomous Driving Systems.”
Yang and her collaborators aim to develop MELIOREM, an automated tool designed to enhance the safety of autonomous vehicles.
MELIOREM will conduct rigorous testing to identify and address potential safety issues before they affect public roads. This initiative ensures that autonomous vehicles are dependable and safe for all road users.
Using advanced search techniques, MELIOREM will simulate various driving scenarios to assess how well these vehicles perform under different conditions. It will also leverage extensive computational power for complex calculations and analysis.
As part of their work, the researchers will develop a series of algorithms and tools to optimize test coverage, emulation efficiencies, and identify representative safety cases for autonomous vehicles under test. This work will resolve these AV development issues with respect to their practical analysis by applying MELIOREM in intelligent cyber-systems in transportation and crash analysis research domains.
Regarding the importance of this research, Yang said, “MELIOREM will help scientists and engineers to characterize and pinpoint the vulnerabilities in their systems and help them generate data for crash analysis, towards trustworthy, reusable and sustainable community software for science and engineering.”
Yang received total funding of $589,751 from the National Science Foundation for this project. Her share of the funding is $279,674. Funding began in Sept. 2024 and will end in late Aug. 2027.
