Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) in Scenarios: Extending Scenario Description Language for Connected Vehicle Scenario Descriptions

Abstract

The move towards connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) has gained a strong focus in recent years due to the many benefits they provide. While the autonomous aspect has seen substantial advancement in both the development and testing methodologies, the connected aspect has lagged behind, especially in the verification & validation discussions. Integrating connectivity into the development and testing framework for CAVs is a necessity for ensuring the early deployment of cooperative driving systems. A key element within such a framework is a test scenario, which represents a set of scenery, environmental conditions, and dynamic conditions, that a system needs to be tested in. However, the connectivity element is not present in any of the current state of the art scenario description languages (SDLs) that are publicly available. This leaves a gap within the CAV development ecosystem. To accommodate for, and accelerate the development of, connected vehicle systems and their verification and validation methods, this paper proposes a novel V2X extension to the previously published two-level abstraction SDL. The extension enables communications between vehicles, infrastructures, and further additional entities to be specified as part of the scenario and be subsequently tested in virtual testing or real-world testing. Eight new V2X attributes have been added to the SDL. An example set of syntax and semantic definitions are presented in this paper targeting two different abstraction levels – level 1 aims at the abstract scenario level for non-technical end-users such as regulators, and level 2 aims at the logical and concrete scenario level for end-users such as simulation test engineers.