Agent-Based Autonomous Vehicle Simulation with Hardware Emulation in the Loop

Agent-based simulation is an important testing tool for the development of autonomous vehicle software. Simulators enable engineers to test autonomous driving behavior in virtual environments, which is cheaper, faster, and safer than using a physical vehicle. An important aspect of autonomous driving software is its real-time capability, i.e. its ability to react to unforeseen events and new sensor inputs within a very short amount of time to prevent accidents. In this paper, we present a modular agent-based simulator architecture, which not only simulates the physical behavior of the vehicle, controlled by the software under test, but also its electrical/electronic (E/E) network. In particular, each ECU is simulated using a hardware emulator, which enables us to test the software as if it is run on the actual target hardware. Furthermore, the hardware emulator estimates the execution delays for the software under test, which enables more realistic approximations of the real behavior. In an evaluation example we analyze empirically how well the timing estimates reflect the reality. We show that modeling the memory hierarchy and instruction decoding has a crucial effect on the precision of this estimation.