  The growing advancements in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have emphasized the
critical need to prioritize the absolute safety of AV maneuvers, especially in
dynamic and unpredictable environments or situations. This objective becomes
even more challenging due to the uniqueness of every traffic
situation/condition. To cope with all these very constrained and complex
configurations, AVs must have appropriate control architectures with reliable
and real-time Risk Assessment and Management Strategies (RAMS). These targeted
RAMS must lead to reduce drastically the navigation risks. However, the lack of
safety guarantees proves, which is one of the key challenges to be addressed,
limit drastically the ambition to introduce more broadly AVs on our roads and
restrict the use of AVs to very limited use cases. Therefore, the focus and the
ambition of this paper is to survey research on autonomous vehicles while
focusing on the important topic of safety guarantee of AVs. For this purpose,
it is proposed to review research on relevant methods and concepts defining an
overall control architecture for AVs, with an emphasis on the safety assessment
and decision-making systems composing these architectures. Moreover, it is
intended through this reviewing process to highlight researches that use either
model-based methods or AI-based approaches. This is performed while emphasizing
the strengths and weaknesses of each methodology and investigating the research
that proposes a comprehensive multi-modal design that combines model-based and
AI approaches. This paper ends with discussions on the methods used to
guarantee the safety of AVs namely: safety verification techniques and the
standardization/generalization of safety frameworks.
