Reducing Simulation Testing Time by Parallel Execution of Loosely Coupled Segments of a Test Scenario

Paper in proceeding, 2014

The automotive industry is going through a major transition where all of the main car OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) are putting serious efforts toward self-driving vehicles, and some of the OEMs have the vision to sell fully functional driver-less car by 2020. Software is the primary driving force for implementing different functionalities of today's cyber-physical systems. Being a safety critical system, functionalities of an autonomous vehicle need to be rigorously tested in different driving conditions, for example, weather, traffic, road markings, etc. In order to get early feedback on the implemented functionalities, testing in the simulation environment has become common before testing them on the prototype vehicle. This paper presents an approach to reduce the testing time in the simulation environment by parallelly executing the loosely coupled segments of a test scenario. Reducing simulation testing time is also substantial when we need to run regression test scenarios following changes in the implementation. The preliminary investigation shows that by applying the proposed concept, we can significantly reduce the simulation testing time both in the cases of successful and failed run.