A Systems Engineering Framework and Application to an Open Automated Driving Platform

Automated driving (AD) has been widely recognised as the future of transportation, especially the level-4 AD defined by SAE J3016 with its promising mass-production potential, drawing great attention across industry and the academia. However, high-level AD has been long criticised for its high development cost, high technical uncertainties, and the lack of industrial-accepted processes to assure safety and product quality. This paper presents the work of developing a systems engineering framework and an open platform for facilitating the development of AD features from an industrial perspective. The systems engineering framework is an extension and adjustment of the traditional V-model process to fit for the AD development purposes. Starting from a business need, the development work is arranged in a top-down manner, with techniques of requirements engineering, testing planning, and safety considerations. In order to accommodate the uncertain nature of AD development, agile methods are added and integrated with the proposed framework. With this framework, an open platform was developed and some of the key parts of this platform including hardware, software, communication network, and verification and validation work are presented. An AD feature based on this platform providing the basic AD function was demonstrated. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology and the open platform concept for facilitating AD development in an industrial environment. The work laid groundworks for clearing the way for the industrialisation of AD technologies with the future evolution of the proposed methodology and the platform.