Design Considerations for a Cyber-Physical Testing Language on the Example of Autonomous Driving

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Cyber-physical systems are nowadays used as the term for systems which perceive data from their surroundings for algorithmic processing and enrichment by digital information to generate interactions in their specific context. In recent days, a prominent example for these systems are autonomously driving vehicles that continuously have to sense their environment to calculate the next set points for their control algorithms. The development of these complex and interconnected systems requires the combined utilization of simulations and test-runs in reality to assess the system's quality and to increase the developer's and customer's confidence in the resulting implementation. The combination of interactive as well as unattended simulated system tests has to be in tight coordination with their real counterparts to derive reliable results on the one hand and to save valuable resources on the other hand. In this article, the development and test processes of two autonomously driving vehicles are analyzed to derive essential design drivers for a domain-specific language to unify the description, evaluation, and mutual feedback of simulative and real test-runs.