A Cooperative Driver Assistance System: Decentralization Process and Test Framework

Cooperative Driving has attracted significant attention in recent years. With the help of vehicleto-vehicle (V2V) communication, perception systems may increase their quality of signals, their availability, and their perception range as well as decrease their latency and probability of failure. Moreover, V2V communication enables advancements from individual to cooperative decision making. With the help of a decentralized decision making among road users, the compatibility of varying planning algorithms distributed on several vehicles can be guaranteed. Additionally, the presented approach offers the opportunity to preserve the autonomy of decision making for each vehicle with an integrated validation. The integrated validation declines contradicting maneuvers by applying internal functional safety rules. The increasing progress in the research of cooperative technologies imposes new requirements for testing and validation. Therefore, a modular test framework regarding both the simultaneous integration of several autonomous vehicles and characteristics of a V2V based peer-to-peer communication is described. A combination of ADTF (the application prototyping framework within the Volkswagen group), VTD (a simulation tool-chain of VIRES) and OMNet++ (an open-source component-based network simulator) allows a host of experiments to test and validate cooperative driver assistance systems. In order to prove the decentralization process and the test framework, the paper shows simulation results for a cooperative safety system and a cooperative comfort system.