Thirty-One Challenges in Testing Automated Vehicles: Interviews with Experts from Industry and Research

There is consensus across the automotive industry that Automated Driving Systems and automated vehicles challenge the way how quality assurance and, particularly, testing must be performed. However, there is a lack of up-to-date empirical studies that substantiate this concern. We conducted interviews with several experts from industry and research to systematically identify challenges as well as improvement opportunities in methods and tools. We report in this paper on 31 challenges that we identified in the areas of scenario- and simulation-based testing, test automation, and test execution. One recurrent challenge expressed by many experts is the problem how to translate a desired condition to be tested into an executable scenario model. This is not alone a question of scripting the scenario, but also of considering a vehicle under test that might try to evade the desired test condition.