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With the introduction of vehicular digitization and automation, there has been significant growth in the number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) inside vehicles, followed by the broader use of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADSs). The growth of the number of ECUs has also significantly increased the number of user interfaces. To conduct safe driving, in addition to those related to the real-time control of the vehicle, a driver also needs to be able to digest information effectively and efficiently from various ECUs via the Human-Machine Interface (HMI). To evaluate the safety of ADS, including its interactions with system users, some work has suggested that they will need to be driven for over 11 billion miles. However, the number of test miles driven is not a meaningful metric for judging safety. Instead, the types of scenarios encountered by the driver-vehicle interactions during testing are critically important.

Due to the increasing complexities, the safety assurances for Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) pose challenges. Recent development within the industry and academia suggests a scenario-based approach underpinned by the system’s Operational Design Domain (ODD) for its safety assurance. In such framework, the ODD defines the safe operating boundary, whereas the scenarios set out individual test conditions. To assess the behavior of the system, a critical element for road safety is the ability to respect the rules of the road. This paper joins together ODDs, scenarios, and rules of the road to form a scalable ODD-based safety assurance framework. The backbone of the framework contains a coherent and common taxonomy to describe the ODDs and behavior library, the scenario tagging structure from the ASAM OpenLABEL standard has been used in the example use case.

Increasing automation in the automotive systems has re-focused the industry’s attention on verification and validation methods and especially on the development of test scenarios. The complex nature of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) and Automated Driving (AD) systems warrant the adoption of new and innovative means of evaluating and establishing the safety of such systems. In this paper, the authors discuss the results from a semi-structured interview study, which involved interviewing ADAS and AD experts across the industry supply chain. Eighteen experts (each with over 10 years’ of experience in testing and development of automotive systems) from different countries were interviewed on two themes: test methods and test scenarios. Each of the themes had three guiding questions which had some follow-up questions. The interviews were transcribed and a thematic analysis via coding was conducted on the transcripts.

The advent of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and automated driving has offered a new challenge for functional verification and validation. The explosion of the test sample space for possible combinations of inputs needs to be handled in an intelligent manner to meet cost and time targets for the development of such systems. This paper addresses this research gap by using constrained randomization techniques for the creation of the required test scenarios and test cases. Furthermore, this paper proposes an automated constrained randomized test scenario generation framework for testing of ADAS and automated systems in a driving simulator setup. The constrained randomization approach is deployed at two levels: 1) test scenario randomization 2) test case randomization. The novelty of the proposed approach is in applying the constrained randomization method to generate test scenarios and test cases for automotive system and system of systems in a driving simulator environment.

The introduction of ISO 26262 concepts has brought important changes in the software development process for automotive software. While making the process more robust by introducing various additional methods of verification and validation, there has been a substantial increase in the development time. Thus, test automation and front loading approaches have become important to meet product timelines and quality. This paper proposes automated testing methods using formal analysis tools like Simulink Design Verifier™ (SLDV) for boundary value testing and interface testing to address the demands of ISO 26262 concepts at unit and component level. In addition, the method of automated boundary value testing proposed differs from the traditional methods and the authors offer an argument as to why the traditional boundary value testing is not required at unit (function) level. There are two aspects of the proposed method: automated test case generation and automated test case execution.

Regenerative braking has become one of the major features for a hybrid vehicle as it converts brake energy into electrical energy storable into battery and leads to an increase in overall fuel efficiency of the vehicle. Traditional regenerative braking systems are designed such that the mechanical braking force from the friction brakes is varied in order to get maximum electric braking. This is the optimum method; however, such a system calls from electronics (Anti-lock Braking System) for regulation of mechanical braking leading to an increased cost. In this paper, the authors present a new strategy for implementing a regenerative brake strategy without changing the mechanical brake system of a conventional vehicle converted to a hybrid vehicle. The electric motor that serves as the traction motor or the Integrated Starter Generator (ISG) system, is used for regenerative braking also. There is no change in the other vehicle specifications as compared to the conventional vehicle.