Transnational Testing, Operation and Certification of Automated Driving Systems – Building bricks for the NATM multipillar framework

PreSale validation, certification, homologation as well as aftersale monitoring, continuous (re)homologation during operation of automated vehicles of all levels of automation are still posing major challenges to OEMS, suppliers, developers and certification bodies. These challenges are also reflected in current legislation and included in the latest assessment documents proposed by the UNECE (NATM). In this paper, we present building bricks for addressing these challenges. The building bricks originate from the current and final results of two European sister EUREKA projects. To handle complexity, specific driving functions (composed of the perceiveinterpretact cycle) for relevant operational domains and different perception pipelines were used as representative examples in the projects. As it is well known that the number of kilometres to be driven to thoroughly test the automated driving functionalities by far extends the feasible number. Therefore, one major output is how to generate realistic reference data for simulation via detailed measurements and how these measurements can enhance the various stages in the validation process. This data includes not only general environment (static objects) and scenario measurements (dynamic objects), but also details information on material properties, e.g. in terms of reflectivity, and the realtime monitoring of additional environmental conditions. For selected driving functions and for the environment perception systems the two EUREKA sister projects developed various technologies, methodologies and tools as potential building bricks for the NATM multipillar framework; where a “bestof” selection presented within this paper.