Distributed Accelerated Concurrency Testing Method for Automated Driving System

Recently, the scenario-based test method has become essential for the safety verification of automated vehicles (AVs). However, with the increased functionality of automated driving systems (ADSs) and the expansion of the operational designed domain (ODD), the number of scenario elements that need to be tested has rapidly increased, leading to an explosion of concrete scenarios to be tested. Accordingly, the accelerated test methods targeting the enhanced generation of hazardous concrete scenarios have become the main trend of AV tests. However, existing methods mainly adopt serial processing, which cannot provide multi-threaded parallelism. This paper proposes a distributed accelerated concurrency testing (ACT) method for ADS, which combines an accelerated test method with traditional concurrent testing. The test frame is divided into three layers: a top-layer manager, middle-layer scheduler, and bottom-layer executor. Then, the specific tasks of roles at different layers are determined; for instance, the coverage of a middle-layer scheduler and the test parameters of a bottom-layer executor. In addition, the modified Ackley function is used for preliminary verification of the effectiveness of the proposed test method. Finally, a black-box AV algorithm is tested in the front vehicle cut-in scenario in a virtual environment using the proposed ACT method, traversal concurrency testing method, accelerated serial testing method, and traversal serial testing method. The test results show that the proposed ACT method can effectively find dangerous concrete scenarios in the logical scenario parameter space and reduce the testing time significantly compared to the other three methods.