A tool chain for generating critical traffic situations for testing vehicle safety functions

The validation of the functionality of a vehicle safety function in critical situations requires a realistic representation of the scenarios, which occur in the traffic of cities and their peripheries as well as on motorways. This paper presents a tool chain, which enables the selection of relevant scenarios and evaluates their criticality for the ego vehicle. It combines traffic flow simulation in SUMO with vehicle dynamics simulation in CarMaker. The communication between these two software tools takes place via MATLAB, which identifies the relevant scenarios based on the vehicle parameters and the road network. Since SUMO uses a simplified vehicle model, which does not take into account the slip behaviour and the lateral dynamics, the vehicle dynamics in these situations is not described with sufficient precision. For this reason, a transformation to CarMaker is performed. Special attention has to be paid to the consistency of the road network. Therefore, the trajectories of the vehicles must be the same in both systems. With the ego vehicle, this is realized by generating the control signals at the accelerator, the brake pedal and the steering wheel by means of a MPC controller. The main steps of the tool chain are illustrated using an intersection scenario.