Application Story

The development of Automated Driving Systems (ADS) is set to dominate the budgets of OEMs over the next 10 years, with a huge rise of start-ups and investments in the surrounding ecosystem. To be able to successfully deploy these systems and ensure the safety, it is necessary to use Simulation. This was the case for a Large European Automotive OEM who was evaluating a business strategy to deploy Autonomous Vehicles for the purpose of goods delivery.

After evaluation of the requirements, it was decided to leverage TCS Autoscape™ - suite of solutions for Autonomous Vehicles development and Validation, for the project. TCS Autoscape™ provides an end-to-end solution for Autonomous Vehicles: Data Ingestion and processing (TCS Data Services); highly automated data annotation at scale (TCS Data Annotation Studio); and a behaviour competency based, coverage driven, Simulation Validation solution (TCS SIMPLE).

Challenge: TCS maintains a comprehensive scenario library, which is a key component of TCS SIMPLE, that is intended to be utilised to validate the L4 system that is to be deployed. While evaluating the various Simulation tools in the market, it was felt that multiple simulators would need to be used based on the varying capability and fidelity of the tools. At the time of populating the scenario library, TCS used a format that was not widely compatible due to a lack of standards in the industry. This meant that integrating with various Simulation tools was a laborious and time-consuming effort.

Solution: TCS was able to take advantage of ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1.0.0 and create the scenario library using this format. The goal was to be able to run the scenarios across multifarious simulators which was enabled by ASAM OpenSCENARIO.

Key Benefits: By utilising ASAM OpenSCENARIO, TCS is able to run the scenario across multiple simulators hence making TCS SIMPLE simulator agnostic which is not only a key USP of the tool, but also an essential requirement of the project. ASAM OpenSCENARIO also enables TCS SIMPLE to automate the test execution simultaneously across the different simulators which leads to improved time to market and the ability to reduce the need for physical testing.

A large European Automotive OEM is looking to develop L4 capability in order to deploy a fleet of vehicles that can provide a goods delivery service. A key element to successfully deploy autonomous vehicles is in the Verification and Validation of the software stack that is being deployed. As it stands, the majority of the Validation in the industry, includes physical testing with Simulation not being fully utilised.

TCS Autoscape™ suite of solutions was positioned to enable development and Validation activities, with TCS SIMPLE being assessed to see if it could handle the Simulation aspect of the Validation requirements. SIMPLE boasts a comprehensive scenario library that can be used to accelerate the Validation process – the tool is able to maximise the coverage whilst minimising the number of test cases.

It was a requirement that different Simulation tools will be used along the development process due to the fact that these tools had varying capabilities and fidelity of testing. The challenge here was that the scenario library developed by TCS was not in a standardised format making it hard to utilise them across the various Simulation tools. Additionally, the Simulation tools used their own proprietary format to describe the scenarios, however they had recently enabled compatibility with the OpenSCENARIO format.

In order to minimise the manual effort of conforming to proprietary formats used by the Simulation tools, and for SIMPLE to become Simulation tool agnostic, it was decided that SIMPLE’s scenario library be converted to the standardised ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1.0.0 format.