Risk-Aware Rulebooks for Multi-Objective Trajectory Evaluation under Uncertainty

arXiv cs.RO / 4/28/2026

💬 OpinionModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper proposes a risk-aware formalism to evaluate trajectories when system–environment interactions are uncertain.
  • It models the environment as being influenced by each candidate trajectory, rather than treating uncertainty as external noise.
  • The approach supports complex objective structures, including hierarchical priorities and cases where objectives are non-comparable.
  • The authors prove the formalism defines a preorder over trajectories, guaranteeing consistent preference ordering and avoiding cyclic preferences.
  • An autonomous driving example shows the method improves explainability by making the rationale for trajectory selection more transparent.

Abstract

We present a risk-aware formalism for evaluating system trajectories in the presence of uncertain interactions between the system and its environment. The proposed formalism supports reasoning under uncertainty and systematically handles complex relationships among requirements and objectives, including hierarchical priorities and non-comparability. Rather than treating the environment as exogenous noise, we explicitly model how each system trajectory influences the environment and evaluate trajectories under the resulting distribution of environment responses. We prove that the formalism induces a preorder on the set of system trajectories, ensuring consistency and preventing cyclic preferences. Finally, we illustrate the approach with an autonomous driving example that demonstrates how the formalism enhances explainability by clarifying the rationale behind trajectory selection.