How Simulation based Test Methods will substitute the Proving Ground Testing?

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems have been integrated in vehicles with the aim of reducing traffic accidents caused by human error. Due to the safety-critical application of these systems, a reliable implementation requires an extensive testing process of hardware and software units as well as the entire integrated system. The increasing complexity of these systems, which incrementally have more control over the vehicle, makes purely real-world safeguarding impracticable. As a solution, complementary virtual tests are used to support the validation process in a safe and accelerated way. However, a method for distributing test cases across real and virtual domains according to the relevance of the test method has yet to be defined. In this paper, we investigate different levels of reality in testing ADAS/automated driving functions and derive advantages, disadvantages, and system limitations for each. An emergency braking system serves as a use case, which is evaluated using Hardware-in-the-Loop, Sensor-in-the-Loop, Vehicle-in-the-Loop test methods, as well as vehicle tests on a proving ground. The obtained results show that simulation-based testing is a useful complement to real-world testing. However, various phenomena such as actuator delays or camera lenses have a large impact on the obtained results and need to be taken into account (in models) to ensure the realism of the simulation-based approaches. In addition, the inclusion of real components increases the deviations between test repetitions, being necessary to conduct real tests to evaluate the final performance of the integrated system.