Biblio

We address the question of feasibility of tests to verify highly automated driving functions by optimizing the trade-off between virtual tests for verifying safety properties and physical tests for validating the models used for such verification. We follow a quantitative approach based on a probabilistic treatment of the different quantities in question. That is, we quantify the accuracy of a model in terms of its probabilistic prediction ability. Similarly, we quantify the compliance of a system with its requirements in terms of the probability of satisfying these requirements. Depending on the costs of an individual virtual and physical test we are then able to calculate an optimal trade-off between physical and virtual tests, yet guaranteeing a probability of satisfying all requirements.

The growing use of ICT in complex and critical infrastructures in the energy- and maritime domain leads to the development of system-of-system engineering efforts especially for system architectures. Such efforts need to integrate a standardized elicitation and harmonization of requirements between different interoperability perspectives and with domain-specific aspects. According to this, the paper adapts the existing architecture management approaches SGAM and MAF for a methodology to structure the identification and harmonization of requirements considering domain specific characteristics and interoperability.

A human operator monitoring a safety-critical system has to gather information fast and accurate to detect problems and execute countermeasures in time. So far testing such HMIs is a complex task, since it requires HMI design prototypes embedded into simulated environments to perform tests with professional operators. We propose Konect Value, a heuristic to estimate the relative perception accuracy and operator reaction time already in the HMI design phase. The model-based estimation heuristic solely requires a task model and HMI design sketches as an input. The evaluation metric was applied to seven different HMIs, which were designed by Human Factor experts to support truck platooning. A comparison of the estimated accuracy and reaction times of Konect Value to a lab study (n=33) revealed high correlations for the relative reaction time (r=0.83, p<0.05) and also the relative perception accuracy (r=-0.90, p<0.01). This indicates that Konect Value is a promising heuristic for early HMI design evaluation in the safety-critical system domain.

The application of digital control in the automotive domain clearly follows an evolution with increasing complexity of both covered functions and their interaction. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving Functions (AD) comprise modular interacting software components that typically build upon a layered architecture. As these components are generally developed by different teams, using different tools for different functional purposes and building upon different models of computation, an integration of all components guaranteeing the satisfaction of all requirements calls for coherent handling of timing properties.We propose an approach addressing this major challenge, which consists of four design paradigms. A compositional semantic framework – based on a notion of components, their interfaces and their interaction – provides the common ground. Equipped with well-defined semantics allowing to express specifications in terms of contracts, and together with also well-defined operations (such as decomposition and refinement), the framework gives means to all typical design steps in the considered application domain. The second paradigm consists of a carefully selected set of contract specification patterns covering a multitude of relevant timing phenomena. The third paradigm concerns the embedding of different models of computation into the framework, lifting them into a common semantic domain. The fourth design paradigm provides for integrating models of computation by means of interaction components. All those paradigms are well-known in academia or industrial practice. Although we have extended them where needed in order to fit the particular needs of ADAS/AD design, it is foremost their interplay which is the novelty of our approach.The application of the approach is exemplified by an industrial motivated case study of an emergency stop system. In the course of this demonstration we show that coherent treatment of time and timing effects in ADAS/AD design is indeed possible and can be integrated in typical industrial processes.