Fleet-Level Affective State Aggregation for Traffic Management

Mechanism

Fleet-level affective state aggregation applies the platform's affective modulation layer to a population of autonomous vehicles. Each vehicle maintains its own affective state field, the named control fields disclosed for the platform, including risk sensitivity, novelty appetite, and escalation-under-time-pressure. When multiple vehicles in a fleet share affective state metadata through the platform's communication infrastructure, a fleet-level affective aggregation module observes the shared metadata and detects collective behavioral patterns across the fleet that no single vehicle's state reveals on its own.

The patterns the module is disclosed to detect are collective shifts in the same named control fields the individual vehicles carry: a regional increase in risk sensitivity following a weather event, a localized decrease in novelty appetite following an incident, or a corridor-specific elevation in escalation-under-time-pressure during peak commute hours. The aggregation operates over the affective metadata the vehicles already publish, not over a separate sensor channel.

Aggregate Affective Indicators

The fleet-level aggregation module computes aggregate affective indicators for defined groupings of the fleet. The disclosed groupings are geographic regions, road segments, and fleet sub-populations. An aggregate indicator summarizes the shared affective metadata over one such grouping, so that a region, a corridor, or a class of vehicles can be characterized by the collective affective disposition of the vehicles within it rather than by any individual vehicle's state.

These aggregate indicators are the output of the aggregation stage and the input to the coordination stage. They describe how the fleet, considered collectively over a region or segment, is currently disposed across the affective control fields, for example whether a corridor is currently exhibiting elevated escalation-under-time-pressure or a region is exhibiting elevated risk sensitivity.

The Fleet Policy Coordinator

The aggregate affective indicators are communicated to a fleet policy coordinator. The coordinator adjusts fleet-wide policy parameters in response to the indicators, with the disclosed objective of optimizing traffic flow while respecting the individual vehicles' governance constraints. The policy parameters the coordinator is disclosed to adjust are following-distance floors, speed limit buffers, and merge-persistence timeouts.

The coordinator therefore closes a loop from collective affective experience to fleet policy: collective shifts detected in the aggregate indicators, such as a regional rise in risk sensitivity after a weather event, become adjustments to the policy bounds under which the fleet operates, such as a change to the following-distance floor for the affected region. The adjustment is made at the level of fleet-wide policy parameters, not at the level of any one vehicle's controls.

Policy Bounds, Not Individual Affect

The disclosure draws a strict line around what the fleet-level adjustment is permitted to touch. The fleet-level adjustment operates on policy bounds, not on individual affective state. A vehicle whose individual affective state indicates elevated risk sensitivity retains that elevated sensitivity regardless of the fleet-level aggregation. The aggregation can inform and adjust the policy parameters that bound the fleet, but it does not reach into and rewrite the affective state field of any vehicle within it.

This preserves the governance hierarchy that flows downward from policy to affect. Because the fleet-level optimization acts only on policy bounds and never on individual affective state, it can never override an individual vehicle's safety governance. Fleet-scale optimization is structurally subordinate to the per-vehicle governance constraints, so a benefit computed across the fleet cannot relax a constraint that an individual vehicle's own state or policy requires.

Relationship to the Per-Vehicle Affective Layer

The mechanism composes with the per-vehicle affective modulation layer without altering it. The same named control fields, risk sensitivity, novelty appetite, and escalation-under-time-pressure, that modulate an individual vehicle's deliberation are the fields the aggregation reads and summarizes. The fleet layer is additive: it derives a collective view from metadata the vehicles already maintain and publish, and it returns its influence as policy parameter adjustments that sit above the individual affective state rather than inside it.

Because the platform primitives are shared across application domains, the individual vehicle's affective state field, the policy bounds it operates under, and the governance hierarchy that orders policy above affect are the same primitives described elsewhere in the disclosure. The fleet application configures these existing primitives for the traffic-management domain; it does not introduce a separate affective machinery for the fleet.

Illustrative Scenario

Following a weather event in a region, the individual vehicles operating there exhibit elevated risk sensitivity in their own affective state fields. The fleet-level aggregation module observes the shared affective metadata and computes an aggregate affective indicator for that region reflecting the collective increase in risk sensitivity. The fleet policy coordinator receives the indicator and adjusts fleet-wide policy parameters for the region, for example raising the following-distance floor, to optimize traffic flow under the changed conditions.

Each vehicle continues to carry its own elevated risk sensitivity, and each vehicle's own safety governance remains in force. The fleet adjustment changes the policy bounds within which the vehicles operate; it does not change any vehicle's affective state and cannot override any vehicle's individual safety governance. A corridor-specific elevation in escalation-under-time-pressure during peak commute hours, or a localized decrease in novelty appetite following an incident, would be handled the same way: detected as an aggregate indicator, answered by an adjustment to fleet policy bounds.

Disclosure Scope

Fleet-level affective state aggregation for traffic management, comprising the sharing of affective state metadata across vehicles in a fleet through the platform's communication infrastructure, the fleet-level affective aggregation module that detects collective behavioral patterns such as a regional increase in risk sensitivity, a localized decrease in novelty appetite, or a corridor-specific elevation in escalation-under-time-pressure, the computation of aggregate affective indicators for defined geographic regions, road segments, or fleet sub-populations, and the fleet policy coordinator that adjusts fleet-wide policy parameters including following-distance floors, speed limit buffers, and merge-persistence timeouts, is disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart). The disclosure is characterized by the constraint that the fleet-level adjustment operates on policy bounds and not on individual affective state, so that an individual vehicle retains its own affective state regardless of the aggregation and the governance hierarchy flows downward from policy to affect, never permitting fleet-level optimization to override individual vehicle safety governance.