Application Story
A Seamless ADAS/AD Testing Workflow to Accelerate Test Performance
A Seamless ADAS/AD Testing Workflow to Accelerate Test Performance
Summary
Challenge: Testing automated vehicles is a challenging task for the automotive industry, facing a fragmented tooling landscape, too many dependencies, long iteration cycles quality risks.
Solution: The ADET initiative (Autonomous Driving End-to-End Testing) composed of Industry leaders like Hexagon, Microsoft, Tracetronic, AVL and Synopsys have come together to propose a seamless ADAS/AD testing workflow through the use of ASAM OpenX Standards enabling ~500x more test runs than similar setups without seamless toolchain. As one fully integrated and aligned holistic solution, it combines state of the art tools, infrastructure and usage of ASAM standards and enables traceability & monitoring, closed data loop, virtual process mapping etc. with a single point of contact, guarantying continuous quality assurance along the development process.
Key Benefits: OEMs and Tier1s can leverage this workflow solution to release high quality ADAS & AD features quickly by scaling up test coverage, turnaround time and enabling interoperability. Its flexibility allows tailoring to meet specific needs by allowing to add, remove, or modify any components or tools as required.
Application Story
The ADET initiative (Autonomous Driving End-to-End Testing) composed of Industry leaders like Hexagon, Microsoft, Tracetronic, AVL and Synopsys have come together to propose a seamless ADAS/AD testing workflow through the use of ASAM OpenX Standards enabling ~500x more test runs than similar setups without seamless toolchain, that would actually be a virtual trip to the moon and back 50 times over!
To increase safety and gain market share, OEMs brings more and more new ADAS features along their development cycles and must bring them fast into the vehicle to be in time for the Start of Production. Problem comes from complexity: according to ADET experience, a vehicle has more than 50 embedded systems distributed over more than 20 control units. That leads to millions of tests, to be covered by multiple teams involved at OEMs, Tier1s and Tier2s doing the daily code changes. All that knowing that hardware is often not even available during development.
As of today, there is no single solution that enables fast and seamless iteration loops over the whole ADAS development process. Toolchain and interfaces are often optimized for different testing purposes and there are too many dependencies exist between tools.
But if tools do not fit, workflows do not run… causing delays in software development, too little test coverage, gaps in quality and safety etc.
AVL, Microsoft, Hexagon, Synopsys, and Tracetronic have taken up the challenge and work together on a seamless testing workflow as one fully integrated and aligned holistic solution. It combines state of the art tools, infrastructure and usage of ASAM standards and enables traceability & monitoring, closed data loop, virtual process mapping etc. with a single point of contact, guaranteeing continuous quality assurance along the development process. This integrated digital and automated toolchain facilitates highly efficient and precise Simulation of driving functions and their testing in conjunction with various sensors, control elements, and driving environments to bring ADAS features faster into the car.
Through this ADET initiative, these five companies are working together to combine their expertise:
- Hexagon provides the environment simulation tool with Virtual Test Drive (VTD) and the Nexus Cloud Platform to connect tools and cloud and enable computational power and collaboration. Hexagon’s expertise in standardization (particularly with ASAM) is key to this initiative.
- Microsoft provides a secure and scalable cloud infrastructure for AVOps (Autonomous Vehicle Operations) including: DataOps to ingest measurement data, MLOps to train algorithms and automate scenario-based testing at scale, ValOps to validate autonomous driving functions and finally AVOps playing a role of centralized orchestration.
- Tracetronic provides platform-independent, standardized test and process automation through test.guide and ecu.test. Numerous tools can be connected and easily integrated in the workflow.
- AVL provides SCENIUS™, a groundbreaking solution for scenario-based testing and safety assessment, including strong integration capabilities of testing solutions with an open interface architecture. AVL has the key XIL testing and engineering solution competences necessary for ADET.
- Synopsys provides Silver, the market leading SIL technology for virtualization of the electronics architecture, that can compile the virtual ECU as FMU (Functional Mockup Interface).
By leveraging open standards such as ASAM OpenDRIVE, ASAM OpenSCENARIO XML, OpenSceneGraph or ATX, the workflow becomes adaptable, and applicable to any tool landscape or cloud provider.
This in turn enables the consortium to offer a complete but flexible workflow in which users can easily add, remove or modify one or multiple components:
- ASAM OpenDRIVE is used to exchange map data:
- ASAM OpenSCENARIO XML is used to exchange scenario data between Scenius and VTD
- OpenSceneGraph is used for 3D models
- ASAM ATX (Automotive Test Exchange) is used for test results
- FMI (Functional Mock-up Interface)
The consortium decided to focus on two use cases initially: The software developer and the tester:
- The software developer creates a new code change, which is automatically built into an executable by the company’s CI/CT pipeline as part of the “Software Build”. This needs to be tested so that the SW Developer receives feedback on how well the change works, and can ensure that there is no regression, before the change is merged into the main codebase. This feedback should be provided within minutes in order to increase the speed of development. To achieve this, the components are tested in a scalable execution environment, where different instances of an execution container can be created in order to run a large number of tests in parallel by turning logical OpenSCENARIO XMLs in many concrete OpenSCENARIO XMLs. The feedback is generated based on the test plan, as defined by the tester or by a suite of regression tests added from past tests.
The requirement or Validation engineer is responsible for systematically creating the safety Validation plan defined in AVL SCENIUS™. New content is then automatically detected in test.guide, and used to distribute the execution across multiple execution environments (“Execution Instances”) and to store the test results from these different instances. Finally, the aggregated Validation results are looped back into in AVL SCENIUS™, where the requirement or test engineer can get an overview of the Validation status and safety performance results. These results are part of the overall safety assessment of the system or vehicle and for the required safety argumentation according to FUSA (ISO 26262) and SOTIF (ISO 21448).
This initiative will enable OEMs and Tier1s to bring ADAS features faster to market, while controlling cost and increasing quality. With the help of ASAM standards, it can be ensured that the workflow is and remains flexible.
We have reached a level of complexity in validating ADAS functions that cannot be solved by a single company alone. Collaboration is key. ADET is an excellent example of how industry-leading partners can leverage open standards to work together, boosting ADAS Validation and testing techniques. This collaboration aims to make mobility safer, more comfortable, and more sustainable.
David Mear, Business Development Manager, Hexagon
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