Validation Frameworks for Self-Driving Vehicles: A Survey

As a part of the digital transformation, we interact with more and more intelligent gadgets. Today, these gadgets are often mobile devices, but in the advent of smart cities, more and more infrastructure---such as traffic and buildings---in our surroundings becomes intelligent. The intelligence, however, does not emerge by itself. Instead, we need both design techniques to create intelligent systems, as well as approaches to validate their correct behavior. An example of intelligent systems that could benefit smart cities are self-driving vehicles. Self-driving vehicles are continuously becoming both commercially available and common on roads. Accidents involving self-driving vehicles, however, have raised concerns about their reliability. Due to these concerns, the safety of self-driving vehicles should be thoroughly tested before they can be released into traffic. To ensure that self-driving vehicles encounter all possible scenarios, several millions of hours of testing must be carried out; therefore, testing self-driving vehicles in the real world is impractical. There is also the issue that testing self-driving vehicles directly in the traffic poses a potential safety hazard to human drivers. To tackle this challenge, validation frameworks for testing self-driving vehicles in simulated scenarios are being developed by academia and industry. In this chapter, we briefly introduce self-driving vehicles and give an overview of validation frameworks for testing them in a simulated environment. We conclude by discussing what an ideal validation framework at the state of the art should be and what could benefit validation frameworks for self-driving vehicles in the future.