TASTE - Traffic Assistant Simulation and Testing Environment

Advanced Driver Assistance functionalities (ADAS) are an increasingly important selling point for vehicles as they improve both safety & convenience when driving in traffic. Besides data from vehicle sensors like radar and camera, information received from the infrastructure will become very important in the future.

For safety reasons ADAS functionalities should not be initially tested and optimized on public roads. An additional reason for usage of simulation technology is the reproducibility of the tested scenarios.

TASTE will show how ADAS functionalities can be developed and optimized using an integrated development environment before they are tested at the test-bed and validated on the road. In this project a CACC-function (Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control) in combination with a TLA (Traffic Light Assist) will be implemented in a test vehicle.

The velocity of the vehicle will be optimized utilizing information from the infrastructure. The result will be reduced energy consumption and in some cases also reduced travel times. Additionally, the integrated simulation environment will enable evaluation of feedback to the overall traffic.

The particular challenge in this project is to combine development- and test-tools from different domains (V2X and ADAS) into an integrated environment, incorporating the results of the individual development teams. Ideally, the simulation and test-bench environments should only differ in the components used (i.e. replace vehicle model by the real vehicle).

This requires, besides good tools for co-simulation, a considerate choice of the interfaces between the components (design for testing). TASTE interconnects Information Technology (simulation and vehicle electronics) with communication-technologies (V2X communicating in real time traffic light signal phase and timing). This enables the implementation and validation of ADAS functionality in simulation as well as in reality.