Preliminary Conference Program


Issues, strategies and innovations driving and shaping the development and deployment of ADAS and AV technologies

SUNRISE: the afety assurance framework for connected and automated mobility systems

Stefan de Vries
Project manager connected and automated vehicles
Applus Idiada
Spain
Safety assurance of cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) systems is a crucial factor for their successful adoption and deployment in society. But the wide variety of individual initiatives in this field tends to silo solutions and hamper the large-scale and safe introduction of CCAM systems in our society. It is for these reasons that the SUNRISE project has been initiated. Halfway through this project, a draft version of the safety assurance framework has recently been completed, on which international vehicle safety bodies and individual CCAM experts are now invited to provide their feedback.

What the audience will learn

  • SUNRISE: the European recipe for safety assurance of highly automated vehicles, and its main ingredients
  • How the SUNRISE project aims to realize a one-stop shop for holistic safety assurance of highly automated vehicles
  • Why a wide variety of international vehicles safety bodies are interested in the safety assurance framework that SUNRISE proposes

Deploying a safe and trustworthy AV in different markets

Vivetha Natterjee
Autonomous vehicle safety specialist
CEVT
Sweden
Now that we have removed the human from the vehicle has the AV become safer in traffic? No. We have removed the human and not the human element. But wait, is removing the human the solution? No. In fact the opposite is true, more the merrier. In Vivetha's multi-pillared approach to continuously improve and deploy safe and trustworthy autonomous vehicles, 'inclusion is key'. Data, verification and personas need to be weighed equally. Humans in our different roles (as engineers, as drivers, as traffic inspectors etc.) are to be modelled using AI in order to understand and prove safety of AV.

What the audience will learn

  • How to instill trust with end user to hail a Robotaxi
  • How can safety of an AV be measured using a multi-pillared approach?
  • How sensible it is to share the AV Ecosystem?

Are ADAS functions ready for the real world?

Dalia Broggi
Project Manager
European Commission
Italy
Ensuring automotive safety requires a shift from standard type-approval tests to comprehensive evaluations. This study compares traditional tests with real-world assessments by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), revealing ADAS/AD function limitations. It promotes defining Operating Design Domains (ODDs) within which the functions and systems are supposed to reach the minimum requirements. The type approval checks should consist of semi-random testing within this ODD. A proposed "robustness index" enhances reliability across diverse conditions. Market surveillance gains importance for independent testing, needing tailored protocols. This integrated approach aligns regulatory compliance with real-world safety, ensuring vehicles meet stringent standards beyond laboratory tests.

What the audience will learn

  • European Commission's role in Europe market surveillance activities
  • European Commission Joint Research Centre's method of testing ADAS/AD in real-world environments
  • Limitations of the traditional type-approval methodology when it comes to software-based functions

Implementing operational design domain for real-world operation

Dr Andreas Richter
Engineering Program Manager - Operational Design Domains
Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles
Germany
The concept of operational design domain (ODD) has been discussed in research and industry for a number of years but real-world applications beyond testing are not yet on the road. Regulations will demand a comprehensive ODD description for type approval as well as service area approval. Today’s ODD definitions are very generic and deliver only a few insights about the boundary conditions. This leads to additional efforts for explanation and showing (scenario-based) test results. Additionally, the argumentation of the completeness of the tests gets complicated. Having a technically precise but still human and machine-readable ODD definition could bridge this gap.

Leashing AI: On Challenges and Solutions in Autonomous Vehicle Safety Assurance

Ali Nouri
Senior system safety engineer in autonomous driving
Volvo Cars
Sweden
Safe behavior of autonomous vehicles needs to be assured before being deployed on public roads and maintained safely during the operation phase. This presentation will delve into the following key aspects: 1. Autonomous Vehicle Safety Assurance and SafetyOps approach 2. Challenges toward Rapid SafetyOps, exemplified by System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) 3. Generative AI and Large Language Models as a Potential Solution

The UK's approach to connected and automated mobility (CAM)

Sumit Pandey
Head of Commercialisation
CCAV
UK
The Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) is a joint unit of the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) and Department for Transport (DfT) unit. This presentation will provide an update on UK government activities on its £100 million, commercialising connected and automated mobility (CAM) programme from 2022-25 and the UK’s future plans for CAM innovation, commercialisation, regulation and legislation. In November 2023, the UK government committed up to £150 million funding between 2025-30 for CAM R&D and early commercialisation of these technologies, whilst also ensuring these are safe and secure for all.

What the audience will learn

  • Established in 2015, CCAV is an expert policy unit that is shaping the safe and secure introduction of self-driving vehicles and services on UK roads.
  • Since 2015, CCAV has enabled over £600 million pounds joint public and private investment across more than 100 collaborative R&D projects involving over 200 organisations.
  • In August 2022, the UK government announced its approach to the safe and secure introduction of self-driving technologies by 2025, committing £100million of R&D funding to target early commercialisation of CAM.
  • In November 2023, the UK government announced the introduction for a new Automated Vehicles (AV) Bill, that will deliver one of the most comprehensive legal frameworks of its kind anywhere in the world for self-driving vehicles, with safety at its core.
  • As part of the UK Government’s Advanced Manufacturing Plan announced in November 2023, the UK Government has further committed up to £150 million of new R&D funding for CAM between 2025-2030. This will help the UK secure first-mover advantage in the deplo

Standards, regulations, homologation and collaboration

Recommendation for a common understanding of ISO 26262 regarding autonomous vehicles

Tobias Traub
Functional safety expert
Bosch
Germany
Jonas Stüble
System architect
Bosch
Germany
Technical regulations and recommendations do not yet fully account for the safety-related availability of power supply systems. Specifically, the application of ISO 26262 on the power supply of autonomous vehicles is troublesome. Concurrently, engineers have gathered to write a recommendation (VDA 450) that facilitates the application of safe electrical power supply to other systems with safety-related availability like autonomous vehicles. This presentation highlights the framework of the VDA 450 recommendation and its principles that comply with ISO 26262 and help to ensure safe power supply for autonomous vehicles.

What the audience will learn

  • Powernet topologies that enable autonomous driving
  • Functional safety requirements breakdown from vehicle level to component level
  • ISO 26262-compliant power supply system
  • Safety measures that ensure freedom from interference
  • Exemplary power supply system topologies

Automated vehicles Level 1-2-3-4-5: overview of regulation/Euro NCAP status and testing challenges

Alain Piperno
Senior expert - autonomous vehicles testing and homologation
UTAC
France
UTAC is a worldwide reference in testing and type approval and an accredited lab for Euro NCAP tests and for type approval tests in France. The presentation will review today's regulation and testing capacities proposals and new challenges including Level 1-2-3-4-5 regulations status for M1 vehicles, shuttles, buses, delivery robots, SW/OTA, cybersecurity, AI and virtual type approval, and today's needs/solutions for testing and validation: physical, new protocols, new targets, rain and fog testing, digital and VIL testing, AI, V2X, cybersecurity, etc.

CAV in-use monitoring metrics development

Ching-Yi Chen
Technical consultant, Smart Mobility Living Lab
TRL
UK
The presentation will focus on developing comprehensive safety metrics for real-time monitoring of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). This monitoring ensures the operational safety of CAV systems and infrastructure in automated driving, remote operation and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) use cases. These metrics align with international safety assurance frameworks and standards for global relevance. Emphasis will be on detailed assessment methodologies to evaluate vehicle system and infrastructure performance. This critical approach feeds into the validation and verification of CAV safety arguments, facilitating safe and secure deployment.

What the audience will learn

  • CAV in-use monitoring introduction
  • Safety assurance frameworks and standards landscape and alignment
  • CAV operational performance assessment
  • CAV in-use safety metrics development
  • CAV in-use monitoring in safety assurance and certification

Germany's autonomous driving law – technical challenges and liability risks

Benjamin von Bodungen
Lawyer/partner
Bird & Bird LLP
Germany
Germany has recently adopted one of the most innovative legal frameworks on self-driving vehicles in the world. Yet the new law also requires compliance with extensive requirements regarding vehicle design that manufacturers, suppliers and the engineering community must be aware of. The presentation will place particular emphasis on these technical challenges. For instance, autonomous vehicles must be equipped with systems for mastering dilemma situations that prioritize the interests at stake in the event of an unavoidable accident. Manufacturers also have to ensure safety against cyberattacks throughout the entire vehicle lifecycle. Non-compliance bears significant risks of civil or even criminal liability.

What the audience will learn

  • The key elements and responsible parties under the new German law on autonomous driving
  • The technical challenges that must be overcome when designing and marketing autonomous vehicles
  • How to effectively mitigate liability risks when bringing autonomous vehicles to the road

Panel Discussion - Building an integrated toolchain for safe & confident deployment of autonomous vehicle and ADAS technologies

Ali Nouri
Senior system safety engineer in autonomous driving
Volvo Cars
Sweden
Phil Durston
Technical manager Volkswagen vehicle development: proving grounds AD strategy
Volkswagen AG
Germany
Benjamin Engel
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
ASAM eV
Germany
Alexander F Walser
Managing Director
Automotive Solution Center for Simulation e.V.
Germany
Thomas Tentrup
Director of R&D
KÜS Bundesgeschäftsstelle
Germany
Karla Quintero
Research engineer/research and technology coordinator
IRT SystemX
France

Advances in software, AI, architecture and data management.

Ensuring vehicle software quality in an autonomous and V2X ecosystem

Nishant Khadria
Director
Deloitte
Germany
Modern vehicles are no less than 'smartphones on wheels'. The huge growth in in-vehicle functionalities demands increased and continuous connectivity while regulatory requirements mandate extensive testing and cybersecurity. The situation is intensified by ecosystem partners ranging from 'steel to software' and 'simulation to street'. As the cost ratio of software to whole vehicle rises, efficient 'software quality' becomes crucial to manage costs, win market share and achieve early compliance. The presentation proposes a process- and product-based software quality framework in an autonomous and V2X environment through qualitative measurement of customizable KPIs through assessments and tests.

What the audience will learn

  • Importance of software in the connected vehicle ecosystem
  • How to measure and manage software quality at different levels of the development lifecycle
  • Future challenges and proposed target operating model

Chasing milliseconds: how we optimized in-vehicle OS boot time

Dustin Black
Senior principal performance engineer
Red Hat
Germany
The presentation will take you on a technical journey through some of the challenges of adapting a general-purpose Linux OS to an embedded automotive use case with strict regulatory and safety requirements. Extra seconds of boot time are hardly noticeable or impactful for servers with hundreds of days of uptime, but for a platform rebooted many times in a day and that must provide user interaction in seconds from power on for safety reasons, suddenly every CPU cycle is under the microscope.

What the audience will learn

  • Firmware loading, kernel optimization, initrd minimization, I/O device acceleration
  • Deploying critical applications to the earliest possible CPU cycle
  • Differences between optimizing x86_64 and aarch64 environments
  • Collecting and analyzing performance data at scale
  • Tools and methods used by expert engineers

Scalable software development addressing different levels of autonomy

Georg Kuschk
Director of perception
Plus
USA
The presentation will cover common software architecture for different autonomy levels, how the development and deployment of products at different autonomy levels benefit each other, and examples and lessons learned from Plus’s deployments in Europe, the US and Australia.

What the audience will learn

  • Insights from Plus’s real-world autonomous driving technology deployments across the world
  • How to rethink automated vehicles with the unified software architecture of the future
  • A data-driven approach in developing scalable and reliable autonomous driving systems

Accelerate AV development with data-driven automotive AI

Frank Kraemer
Systems architect
IBM Germany
Germany
Developing AVs is a time-intensive and complex process that requires best-in-class data and AI training infrastructure. Companies developing software-defined vehicles need to accelerate time-to-market and minimize costs without sacrificing safety. Combining vehicle sensors, map data, telematics and navigation guidance using machine learning and data fusion techniques, data-driven development is not without its challenges. One of the biggest challenges is data collection and integrity, as data needs to be collected accurately and consistently to drive accurate decisions.

What the audience will learn

  • AI-powered computing for AV development
  • Data-driven development
  • Accelerate AV development

Journey toward software-defined connected and autonomous vehicles (SDCAV)

Plato Pathrose
CTO and technical director ADAS and automated driving
Vinfast Germany
Germany
The presentation will discuss the roadmap toward software-defined vehicles. What does a software-defined connected and autonomous vehicle look like and what are the requirements to design and deploy those vehicles? It will also cover the requirements and design considerations that are taken into account for vehicle architecture and various vehicle components. The change in approaches to the development, testing and production of the vehicles will be discussed. The drastic migration toward utilizing new technologies for the service and maintenance phase planned for such vehicles will be discussed.

What the audience will learn

  • What does a software-defined connected and autonomous vehicle mean?
  • The overall architecture of a software-defined vehicle
  • Design and integration requirements for various vehicle components in an SDV
  • Evolution of production and service processes in SDV rollout

SDV and vehicle motion management

Dirk Bangel
Chief expert
Robert Bosch
Germany
The presentation will show how vehicle motion management, a software system solution from Bosch for the complete vehicle motion domain, helps to drive the transformation toward software-defined mobility through multi-actuator control, a modular and scalable software architecture that simplifies the separation of hardware and software, centralized computing and standardized interfaces.

What the audience will learn

  • Software-defined vehicle
  • Vehicle motion management
  • Common API and SDK
  • Integration model

How generative AI will transform ADAS/AD

Gabriel Sallah
ADAS/AD Lead Architect
Microsoft
United Arab Emirates

How does the law on AI influence autonomous driving?

Jörg Kahler
Partner
GSK Stockmann
Germany

Panel Discussion - Safe AI for Automated Driving: Reality or Fiction?

The current hype around ChatGPT and Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased the focus on the need for regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI) (UK’s Global AI Safety Summit (Nov 2023) & US Govt’s Executive Order on AI). AI algorithms which are non-deterministic form a fundamental part of any Automated Driving System. Using non-deterministic algorithms in safety critical systems like Automated Driving require new approaches to safety argumentation & their regulation. This panel session will bring diverse AI approaches in AD development & diverse regulatory approaches to identify both the need and feasibility of regulation & developing safe AI.

What the audience will learn

  • Establish if (and how) AI development for Automated Driving needs to be regulated / standardised
  • Strategies for tackling bias and completeness for training & testing datasets for AI development for Automated Driving
  • Role and new challenges that LLMs bring with their incorporation to Automated Driving System development
  • Difference in AI governance & regulatory approaches between type-approval and self-certification frameworks
Dr Siddartha Khastgir
Head of Verification & Validation, Intelligent Vehicles
WMG, University of Warwick
UK
Richard Damm
President
KBA
Germany
Dirk Gorissen
Product lead - AI Driver
Wayve
UK
Georg Stettinger
Senior project manager R&D funding department
Infineon
Germany

Accelerating Software Defined Vehicles through Open Source

Dan Cauchy
Executive Director
Automotive Grade Linux
USA
The concept of a software-defined vehicle (SDV) has become a hot topic across the industry as automakers look for ways to address the dramatically growing complexity of developing and deploying software while simultaneously building the foundation for self-driving vehicles. Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), an open source software platform for connected car technology, has been working on software-defined vehicles for the past eight years. Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of AGL, will discuss the current state of SDVs and the work being done by automakers and Tier 1s as part of the AGL SDV Expert Group. He’ll also provide insight into the driving trends behind SDVs and enabling technologies including virtualization, containers, and the cloud.

What the audience will learn

  • Benefits of open source software and how sharing a single software platform across the industry decreases development times so OEMs and suppliers can focus on rapid innovation and bringing products to market faster
  • An overview of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a non-profit, open source software platform supported by 150+ members, including 11 automakers
  • AGL project milestones and future roadmap
  • Production use cases for AGL, future roadmap and how to get involved

What’s ahead for ADAS computing?

Guilherme Marshall
Director, ADAS GTM
Arm
UK
Most computational capabilities that will power vehicles starting production in 4-5 years have already been designed in. For a fast-moving software function such as automated driving, this is massive challenge. Thus, in the absence of a crystal ball, Arm builds on close collaborations with leading automotive OEMs and suppliers to define next-generation compute platforms. This presentation will discuss their challenges and how upcoming technologies will help enable more efficient ADAS/AD software innovation.

What the audience will learn

  • Latest trends in ADAS and AD in-vehicle computing
  • Advances in functional safety, performance and cross-domain fusion capabilities
  • Strategic factors affecting the selection of centralized vehicle compute platforms

Relevance of explainable AI and AI compliance for scaling AV fleets

Lucas Bublitz
Principal autonomous vehicle
P3 Automotive GmbH
Germany
The commercialization of AVs in San Francisco defined a new phase, as the maturity of technology is now proven at small scale. But scaling AVs requires an overall understanding of the occurrence of errors and their impact on decision making or misbehavior, as faults and failures can lead to a decrease in safety and confidence in AVs. It underlines the relevance of adopting the methods of explainable AI and applying conformity to the upcoming AI regulation. Transparency in self-driving systems ML/DL black boxes is essential for the operation and therefore the scalability of AI-enabled self-driving systems.

What the audience will learn

  • The proof of concept of AV fleets is achieved, but scaleability brings new obstacles in terms of operation safety/security
  • Methods of explainable AI must be applied to achieve transparency in the machine/deep learning models and overall product safety
  • Achievement of product confirmity with AI regulation (e.g. AI Act, ISO 8800)
  • Explainable AI helps to adress product conformity for high-risk AI