Testing Functions for Highly Automated Driving on PC Clusters

• Scalable PC clusters with a high number of VEOS instances and virtual ECUs for the parallel execution of virtual test drives
• SYNECT for data management and scheduling the execution of the simulation jobs and test cases
• Testing faster than real time and driving many test kilometers every day during the early development phase
• Deterministic and reproducible test execution
• Comprehensive integration tests during development

In order to validate functions for highly automated driving, a large number of tests must be performed during the development phase and for the final release. In addition to the established methods, this effort can only be accomplished with the help of software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation. For maximum test throughput in the shortest possible time, the virtual validation tool chain with VEOS clusters relies on greatly parallelizing execution nodes and simulations in combination with creating high scalability. The driving scenarios to be tested are fed into a central manager node. This node distributes the individual tests to a network of execution nodes that are integrated either as PCs or as virtual machines. Here, the tests on VEOS are performed in batch mode. Furthermore, ECU prototypes often do not exist in early development phases, so that virtual ECUs (V-ECUs) are used. To avoid manual integration of a large number of V-ECUs during extensive chains-of-effects tests, the continuous integration approach is becoming increasingly important, in which the V-ECUs are generated fully automatically from current software versions. The SYNECT test and data management software manages the cluster and allows for an easy integration of the existing tests and continuous-integration processes.