Test Strategies for Efficient Validation of Automated Driving Functions

Automated driving functions require a validation effort that can hardly be handled effectively anymore by means of traditional methods. Moreover, it is desirable to provide software updates over-the-air (OTA) during a vehicle’s lifecycle. This drastically shortens software development cycles and obviously results in trends toward agile software development processes using continuous integration, testing and deployment (CI/CT/CD).By means of scenario-based testing, virtual test driving offers the opportunity to test the driving functions of automated vehicles and their OTA updates in a wide variety of relevant and critical situations and to generate findings for the development and validation of functions within a short period of time. So-called functional decomposition assists in this area as well. It enables isolated investigations of individual modules in testing and validation contexts, which makes it possible to reduce the relevant parameters in the scenario description. Virtual prototypes – i.e., digital twins of real-world vehicle prototypes – provide the basis for firmly anchoring these modern test methods in the development process and assist in the area of OTA updates. For this purpose, the system under test is integrated into a virtual prototype and tested in realistic scenarios as a total system – consistently in each phase of the development process.A combination of agile software development and virtual vehicle development can decisively contribute to successfully meeting the demands made on the validation of automated driving functions and to providing tested OTA updates within a short period of time.