With trials of driverless cars currently underway in the UK, research and test services company Horiba MIRA Ltd is ‘reminding’ manufacturers of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) about the importance of incorporating a scenario-based testing regime into the early stages of vehicle design and development.

Horiba MIRA (www.horiba-mira.com) says that with physical vehicle testing becoming increasingly time-consuming, resource-heavy and costly, scenario-based testing is vital to improve the efficiency and cost of verifying and validating CAVs.

“It is often cited that billions of miles are required to demonstrate confidence in CAV systems, which is seen as non-viable for vehicle manufacturers with multiple product types and model variants — and for technology companies with short development and product lifecycles.”

This scenario-based approach is already being backed by several government-supported initiatives in which Horiba MIRA has played a key role, including the SAVVY and HumanDrive projects.

As part of both projects, the company has developed ‘unique’ processes to ‘evolve’ vehicle and regulatory requirements into a comprehensive set of testable scenarios that will validate and verify the performance of the CAV systems.

The range of test scenarios developed will ensure that CAVs can perform functionally and safely, both in normal operation and in unexpected situations.

Rob Capaldi, CAV commercial manager at Horiba MIRA, said: “With the testing and trialling of CAVs moving into real-world deployment, it’s great to see the UK at the forefront of the market, with a large number of both physical and simulated trials.

However, driving a billion miles will not necessarily tell you how safe a vehicle is. Going forward, we expect the process that determines the road-worthiness of such vehicles to centre less on a single test or an arbitrary number of miles travelled, and more on proving they can safely perform in the ‘infinite’ number of scenarios that the vehicle is likely to see in the real world.

"This can be achieved by utilising a scenario-based testing approach, in which test scenarios are identified, categorised and managed, as the key foundation to the vehicle tests.”