Collaborative autonomous vehicles will appear in the near future and will transform deeply road transportation sys-tems, addressing in part many issues such as safety, traffic efficien-cy, etc. Validation and testing of complex scenarios involving sets of autonomous collaborative vehicles are becoming an important challenge. Each vehicle in the set is autonomous and acts asyn-chronously, receiving and processing huge amount of data in real time, coming from the environment and other vehicles. Simulation of such scenarios in real time require huge computing resources. This paper presents a simulation platform combining the real-time OPAL-RT Technologies for processing and parallel computing, and the Pro-SiVIC vehicular simulator from Civitec for realistic simulation of vehicles dynamic, road/environment, and sensors behaviors. The two platforms are complementary and their combin-ing allow us to propose a real time simulator of collaborative au-tonomous systems.

The LIVIC – a research department from INRETS and LCPC – focuses on the development and the evaluation of driving assistance systems. Several years ago, for the needs of its research activity, LIVIC launched the development of a software architecture SiVIC™, which made possible simulation of multi-frequency sensors responses embedded on static or dynamic devices, equipments and vehicles commonly used in ADAS. Raw data from perception systems are then replaced by accurate synthesised data whenever the scenarios for creating these data are too complex, too dangerous to realize or simply because data did not exist. CIVITEC has been created in October 2008 as a spin-out of INRETS and LCPC to focus on industrialisation, development and distribution of Pro-SiVIC – commercial and professional version of SiVIC™ – to the research community and industry. To further streamline the virtual prototyping process, several enhancements have been added including road networks modelling. The ROADS software is owned and developed by LIVIC and based on OpenDRIVE® specifications, an open file format for the logical description of road networks. LIVIC and CIVITEC are currently extending their collaboration in order to add ROADS into the CIVITEC software portfolio.

The increasing levels of software- and data-intensive driving automation call for an evolution of automotive soft-ware testing. As a recommended practice of the Verification and Validation (V&V) process of ISO/PAS 21448, a candidate standard for safety of the intended functionality for road vehicles, simulation-based testing has the potential to reduce both risks and costs. There is a growing body of research on devising test automation techniques using simulators for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS). However, how similar are the results if the same test scenarios are executed in different simulators? We conduct a replication study of applying a Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) solution to a real-world ADAS (PeVi, a pedes-trian vision detection system) using two different commercial simulators, namely, TASS/Siemens PreScan and ESI Pro-SiVIC. Based on a minimalistic scene, we compare critical test scenarios generated using our SBST solution in these two simulators. We show that SBST can be used to effectively generate critical test scenarios in both simulators, and the test results obtained from the two simulators can reveal several weaknesses of the ADAS under test. However, executing the same test scenarios in the two simulators leads to notable differences in the details of the test outputs, in particular, related to (1) safety violations revealed by tests, and (2) dynamics of cars and pedestrians. Based on our findings, we recommend future V&V plans to include multiple simulators to support robust simulation-based testing and to base test objectives on measures that are less dependant on the internals of the simulators.