ADAS Testing in Co-Simulation: Towards a Meta-Model for Defining Test Scenarios

Abstract

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are becoming mandatory for novel vehicles in many nations, as they are widely recognized as a key strategy to improve road safety. Due to their safety-critical nature, ADAS must guarantee the highest safety standards. Nevertheless, the verification and validation of these systems, which are often based on Artificial Intelligence techniques, is a pain point for the automotive industry, as field evaluations are not economically and temporally viable. Furthermore, the widely used Model-in-the-Loop (MiL) validation paradigm struggles when applied to novel ADAS due to the complexity of the scenarios to simulate. A strategy recently proposed in the literature to face this issue is co-simulation, namely the cooperation of a MiL framework with one or more tools, virtually simulating the environment around the vehicle. Although existing, these solutions are still highly tailored, requiring significant manual work to define testing scenarios, also due to the lack of a solid reference framework.

This paper presents a preliminary model-based framework to support the design of co-simulation test scenarios for ADAS, featuring model-based testing assertions through first-order logic formulas. The proposed framework includes a visual editor which empowers domain experts to easily design test scenarios that can be automatically executed using the state-of-the-art virtual environment simulator BeamNG. The solution presented in this paper is our first step towards defining a more comprehensive framework for testing ADAS in co-simulation, providing an environment where testers are not burdened with the time-consuming and low-level task of manually defining each aspect of the virtual testbed.