The urban environment represents one of the greatest challenges for automated vehicles due to the enormous complexity of traffic scenarios and large diversity of potential road users. This complexity and variety of urban traffic scenarios must be mastered safely and reliably for people to be willing to use automated vehicles in urban environments.

A key factor towards acceptance and introduction of this new technology is therefore the proof of safety, verification, and validation of automated vehicles. This topic is the target of the VVM project, which takes up the task of the PEGASUS project in the areas of testing and validation. It continues this work with the aim to develop a methodology for the proof of safety for urban driving – especially for the use case of urban intersections.

The FZI Research Center for Information Technology is responsible for “Test Procedure” subproject 7 and deals with the overall test methodology for Level 4 and Level 5 vehicles. The focus is on concepts and methods of an integrated test procedure from simulation to real tests for a modular safety enhancement of automated vehicles. In addition, central infrastructure elements in the form of test vehicles and test benches are being set up or expanded at the FZI.