A novel methodological framework for testing automated vehicle functions

Abstract

Since there are more and more highly automated vehicles in road transportation with various extremely safety-critical functions, it is crucial to intensify the development of testing methods. Following this consideration, this paper introduces a new methodological framework for evaluating automated vehicle functions. In the first step, the article proposes a method to select and calibrate the possibly applied and implemented control model. Following this, the developed approach suggests the comparison of the performed test results and the identified theoretical model outputs by evaluating the similarity of the investigated distributions based on statistical hypothesis tests. If the distributions of the real system’s output and the theoretical model’s output are close enough to each other, we can assume that the operation performance of the real system in the case of the investigated operation scenario is acceptable.