Cluster Simulation for Highly Automated Test Drives

Driving millions of kilometers on your PC

The Advantages: Test Drives with VEOS

  • Comprehensive testing at an early development stage
  • Highly scalable due to virtual ECUs
  • Deterministic and reproducible test execution
  • High test throughput through fast test execution

The Challenge: Millions of Test Kilometers as Fast as Possible

For testing highly automated driving functions or self-driving cars, millions of kilometers of test drives are necessary. These test drives must cover a broad range of roads, weather conditions, and traffic scenarios. Using only hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulators for these tests would require a vast amount of HIL systems and real ECU prototypes, which would increase investment costs beyond reason.

The Idea: Numerous Virtual Test Drives with a PC

As a PC-based simulation platform, VEOS offers the ideal solution for a high number of simulation requests. Due to its open automation interface, test scenarios with VEOS can be executed completely automated. You can set up as many VEOS instances in one cluster as needed for the parallel execution of virtual test drives. The PC cluster is controlled by one central unit that schedules the execution of the simulation jobs and test cases. If you use virtual ECUs (V-ECUs), which can be copied easily and distributed throughout the VEOS cluster, VEOS and V-ECUs together make for a highly scalable test system.

Additionally, VEOS supports the XIL API for accessing and recording the simulation data. The data can be transferred to a central storage device and can be analyzed later, for example. The PC-based simulation lets you execute the tests faster than in real time. Depending on the number of VEOS instances used, you can complete millions of test drive kilometers each day. Any test drive that fails can be reproduced and debugged in detail, also by using VEOS.

One Example: Testing Development Iterations Continuously

Due to the complexity of a highly automated driving function, the software must be tested extensively at several stages of the development. Every other week, the current software version is integrated into one or more V-ECUs and simulated in the VEOS cluster. The resulting data is loaded to a big data analysis tool for analyzing and comparing it to the previous results. This way, improvements or setbacks are easy to identify and correct, if needed. Performing this many test drive kilometers during the first development phase results in a very high software quality even before starting HIL tests or real test drives.

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