Preliminary Conference Program


Demonstrating safety and validating and homologating automated driving systems for the deployment of level 2+ technologies and beyond

Moderator

Marc Pajon
Consultant
TAKTECH SAS
France

The SAM (Safety and Acceptability of Driving and Self-Driving Mobility) research project: results and perspectives

Dr Emmanuel Arnoux
Automated Driving Safety & Validation Working Group co-leader
PFA
France

Regulations and consumer testing requirements in the EU for ADAS and AD and compared to the rest of the world

Andres Aparicio
Head, ADAS and Connected and Automated Vehicles
Applus IDIADA
Spain

The L2+ safety stakes for engineering

Luc Bourgeois
President AD/ADAS expert community
SIA
France

TBC

Dr Benazouz Bradai
Master Expert - Autonomous Driving Innovation Platform Manager
Valeo
France

Omniverse and GenAI to accelerate the development and validation of ADAS

Oussama Ben Moussa
Head/CTO autonomous mobility
Capgemini
France

Mastering the complexity of automated driving in projects beyond L2 with scenario-based testing paving the way to virtual homologation

Dr Heiko Scharke
Global Product Manager
AVL List GmbH
Austria
Hannes Schneider
Lead engineer ADAS/AD scenario-based verification
AVL
Austria

From digital vehicle to virtual twin to immersive virtual twin

Didier Wautier
General manager: synthesis and immersive simulation
Renault
France
The digitalization of Renault Group is not new, but it is intensifying as the company transforms itself into a 'tech company'. This is essential to keep pace with the growing technological complexity of vehicles, the ever-increasing number of technical and regulatory requirements and the continuous improvement of existing and future vehicles in a connected world. In recent years, the tools available to design and engineering have become so advanced that virtual reality has overtaken physical reality. The digital twin exists before the vehicle itself, and evolves throughout the design process, including the customer in the design loop. Depending on the stage of the project, the terms used are digital vehicles, digital twin and immersive digital twin. Their fields of application range from design and development to tuning and homologation.

Ground truth: a full-scale tunnel (V2X, cameras, lidar, etc) to validate and simulate automated driving systems

Pierre Delaigue
Director - connected, autonomous, electric mobility projects
Vinci
France

Summary and further discussion

Marc Pajon
Consultant
TAKTECH SAS
France

Learning from real world and proving ground test & deployment, and integrated virtual testing.

Deploying autonomous vehicles – Holo's experience

Lars Himmer
CEO
Holo
Denmark
Holo is an integrator and operator of autonomous vehicles. It handles applications, training of staff, implementation and supervision of autonomous projects. Holo is currently the driving force behind the leading autonomous project in Europe: the deployment of vehicles using Mobileye’s autonomous software in the Grorud area in Oslo, Norway. The company has deployed more autonomous projects in Scandinavia than any other company. Our experience ensures safe operations that constantly push autonomous technology to its limit and systematically collect data to make improvements in customer experience, stability and autonomous performance.

Agile scenario alteration: a framework to accelerate automated vehicle testing

Nils Katzorke
Project coordinator
Mercedes-Benz AG
Germany
With current progress in automated driving, the number of use cases for automated vehicles that can be tested on proving grounds has become substantial. The point where use cases can be tested in an individual, experimental manner has been exceeded. For economic reasons and to increase the reliability, proving ground tests need to be standardized and set up as fast and cost-effective as possible. Hence, test equipment providers and proving ground operators adopted new methods to rapidly alter test scenarios, regarding road markings, traffic infrastructure, vulnerable road users and other traffic participants. The presentations aims at establishing a connection between different methods of agile scenario alteration to showcase how they can be intertwined in a holistic framework. A crucial question in this context is, how physical test drives and digital test drives relate to each other and what potential benefits of cyber-physical test procedures are. Additionally, the presentation will discuss what crucial environmental conditions are currently not available in standardized digital or physical simulation methods. Examples from the research projects for test infrastructure development at the Mercedes-Benz Test and Technology Center in Immendingen will be provided to make the postulated ideas tangible.

Optimizing ISA experience: city data validation strategies to improve the quality of digital maps with speed limits

René Spaan
EU Smart Mobility project leader
City of Helmond (NL)
Netherlands
In its dedication to road safety, the City of Helmond actively participates in international projects concerning intelligent speed adaptation (ISA) to address speeding concerns, both real and perceived. ISA, recognized for preventing 20% of fatal accidents, notifies drivers of speed limits for compliance. René Spaan examines ISA readiness in medium-sized cities, emphasizing data validation for a seamless user experience. During the readiness assessment for ISA-equipped cars, Helmond observed inaccuracies in speed advice due to unvalidated digital maps lacking verified speed limits. As part of the project, a validation and feedback loop was established between the road authority and the Dutch national access point to optimize the national digital maps of speed limits, usable by third parties.

15:15 - 15:45

Break

Evolving PG for the development and validation of AD in different ODDs

Dr Sebastian Siegl
Function verification & validation strategy responsable automated driving functions
Audi
Germany
Uwe Burckhardt
Head of DEKRA Lausitzring
DEKRA
Germany
Autonomous driving poses a new challenge to the design of proving grounds, as autonomous driving functions evaluate with extensive sensor technology not only the road surface and driving dynamics parameters but also the environment to enable operational design domain-specific features. As a consequence, for function testing under public road conditions, the proving ground tracks and environment must reflect the conditions found on public roads in different ODDs. Another important feature is the enablement of various dynamic scenarios on the test track. Dynamic swarm-based scenarios must be executable, reproducible and safe. For this, the connectivity and communication infrastructure of the participants is needed. This presentation gives insight into the track design, infrastructure, communication and equipment requirements and also solutions for a new type of proving ground for the development and validation of autonomous driving.

The AVL prototype 'AutBus': autonomous public transportation in adverse weather

Armin Engstle
Site manager AVL Roding
AVL Software and Functions GmbH
Germany
The core of the presentation becomes apparent in the evaluation of lidar perception in adverse weather conditions respectively in different rain intensities and fog visibility ranges. The optimization of AD sensor systems in adverse weather is a prerequisite for the all-day use of autonomous vehicles in public transportation. The analysis demonstrates that the influence of fog on lidar perception is significantly higher than the influence of rain. Additionally, it seems, that small rain rates with finer raindrops might be affecting lidar beams more than higher rain rates with thicker drops.

State of the art scenario based testing and simulation

When ODD meets OpenSCENARIO 2.0 – safety-driven validation

Gil Amid
Chief regulatory affairs officer
Foretellix
Israel
The presentation modeling of ODD ( operational design domain) in ASAM OpenSCENARIO® DSL 2.0, and incorporating it into safety-driven validation. The presentation demonstrates the interaction between scenarios and ODD during virtual testing. Special Attention will be given to the challenges of modeling ODDs and validating correct behavior of the ADS within an ODD.

Enabling Virtual Test & Validation – Self-Sovereign Identity via OIDC to enable Decentralized Open Data Markets

Carlo van Driesten
Systems architect for virtual test and validation
BMW Group
Germany
The goal of a virtually enhanced homologation process through the usage of driving simulators relies on the quality of the data used as input for the simulation. If HD Maps, driver models, scenarios, or sensor models, the integration of such elements in various systems throughout deep supply chains demand a common understanding brought by standards like e.g., OpenDRIVE from the ASAM e.V. OpenX. BMW explores the possibility to create an open and decentralized data ecosystem (ODDE) to increase the availability of standardized simulation data. The European research family GaiaX with the help of DLT technologies, self-sovereign identities and zero-knowledge proofs for selective privacy and scaling in open networks serve here as the technological baseline. We show the current state of the ODDE realized in the ENVITED (ENvironment for VIrtual TEst Drive) research cluster at the Automotive Solution Center for Simulation e.V.

How to maneuver in the stakeholder landscape when verifying and validating highly automated driving systems

Dr Majid K Vakilzadeh
AD V&V system architect
Zenseact
Sweden

Method development of test track testing of a head on scenario

Carina Björnsson
Technical expert, driver assistance and active safety test methods
Volvo Car Corporation
Sweden
Head on collisions are high speed collisions and these mostly cause severe injuries of the persons in the vehicle. The speed at the impact is inevitably the sum of the two oncoming vehicle speeds. Volvo Cars decided to investigate how to address these types of accidents with our active safety function collision mitigation by braking. The aim is to primarily mitigate the injuries by reducing the speed at the impact, and not to have full avoidance in all cases. As the function is developed, the question on how to test it was raised. This presentation describes the development of the test methods for testing of such a function. A function that focus on high speeds and interact at a timing of very low time to collision.

Power to the people: democratizing safety for automated driving

Dr Siddartha Khastgir
Head of Verification & Validation, Intelligent Vehicles
WMG, University of Warwick
UK
Hamid Serry
Autonomous Vehicles Engineer
WMG, University of Warwick
UK

Simulation-based critical scenario identification and analysis for automated driving

Adam Molin
Technical manager
Denso Automotive Deutschland GmbH
Germany
Verification and validation processes play a vital role in ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles. Scenario-based testing has emerged as an effective approach for identifying critical scenarios that challenge the capabilities of automated driving systems. This presentation aims to explore the usage of scenario-based testing to automatically identify critical factors by data analysis within a simulation. Built on experience from various R&D projects, the presentation will share best practices and insights for critical scenario identification to maximize efficiency and coverage.

Real-world accident scenario simulation

Thomas Unger
Head of data analysis and simulation
Verkehrsunfallforschung an der TU Dresden GmbH
Germany
The GIDAS (German In-Depth Accident Study) database contains detailed information about accidents and the GIDAS Pre-Crash Matrix (GIDAS-PCM) offers the possibility to observe the pre-crash phase. The GIDAS-PCM contains all relevant data to simulate the pre-crash phase. This includes the characteristics of the participants, the dynamic behavior of the participants as a time-dependent course as well as the geometry of the traffic infrastructure. The paper shows the conversion progress of GIDAS data in OpenDrive and OpenScenario. A detailed investigation of active safety systems in real accident situations has been made feasible and the importance of simulating real-world accidents is shown.

Measuring the quality of a scenario database

Sytze Kalisvaart
Senior project manager
TNO
Netherlands
Many companies have created scenario databases. One question remains open: what is a good scenario database? Based on work with Torc Robotics, Project SunRISE and Hi-Drive, TNO will present approaches and metrics including metrics for identifying missing scenario categories, assessing scenario coverage related to specific environments or operational design domains (ODDs), determining the most common sequences or combinations of scenario categories and comparing data sets across years. Examples will illustrate enriching the database with accidentology and edge cases. These metrics are essential for providing enough confidence in utilizing scenario databases to specify an ODD or test automated driving.

Rapid SW and HW prototyping for automated driving: sensor and function benchmarking with JUPITER platform

Dr Clara Marina Martinez
Engineer - ADAS virtual development
Porsche Engineering Services
Germany
The race to release next-generation ADAS is slow and expensive. Complex ADAS functions are developed using theoretical sensor specifications and can only be tested in late project stages. In Porsche Engineering we have accelerated the time to vehicle testing of our ADAS algorithms by means of our JUPITER vehicles. JUPITER is a fully scalable rapid prototyping platform for ADAS that allows for early close-to-series testing. It integrates state-of-the-art ADAS algorithms, is equipped with high-performance ASIL-D Middleware and scalable data exchange, and is interoperable and real-time capable. We will present the sensor benchmark use case as a teaser of the plethora of possibilities that JUPITER offers.

Navigate toward the next generation of automated driving and software-defined vehicles

Olivier Sappin
CATIA CEO
Dassault Systèmes
France
In the constantly evolving industry ecosystem toward the software-defined vehicle, the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) are at the forefront, promising enhanced safety and a better driving experience. However, the sheer complexity of these technologies requires a paradigm shift in the development strategy to ensure success. This presentation will explore innovative methods based on model-based systems engineering, massive simulation and digital certification scenarios correlated with real on-track results for the delivery of safe and efficient highly automated technology. Key industrial projects with automotive car makers will illustrate the usage of these methods and software solutions.

Panel discussion - Using scenarios and ODDs together to best achieve state of the art safety.

Vincent Abadie
Senior Fellow ADAS and Autonomous Driving
Stellantis
France
Eric Vaillant
Expert leader testing & measurement technology
Renault
France
Dr Andreas Richter
Engineering Program Manager - Operational Design Domains
Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles
Germany
Carlo van Driesten
Systems architect for virtual test and validation
BMW Group
Germany
Moderator:
Marc Pajon, Consultant, TAKTECH SAS