A Credibility Assessment Approach for Scenario-Based Virtual Testing of Automated Driving Functions

An immense test space is pushing the development and testing of automated driving functions from real to virtual environments. The virtual world is provided by interconnected simulation models representing sensors, vehicle dynamics, and both static and dynamic environment. For the virtual validation of automated driving, special attention must be paid to the simulation’s credibility, which can be impaired by inappropriate or inaccurate simulation models and tools. Therefore, in this work a method is proposed to assess the credibility of simulation-based testing for automated driving. The approach allows a qualitative and relatively quantitative comparisons between scenarios as well as between different simulation setups. Therefore, several uni- and multivariate metrics are applied towards a scoring of similarity of the behavior between simulation and real test drive. This is achieved by using ground truth data in form of simulation scenarios from real world measurement data. In this way, the virtual automated vehicle encounters the same conditions and surroundings than its counterpart in the real world for evaluating their similarity. The practical applicability of the proposed credibility assessment approach is demonstrated in a case study, in which the credibility of an exemplary simulation-based test bench is inferred