NEW ASSESSMENT AND TESTING METHODOLOGY FOR VEHICLE TYPE APPROVAL - PART 3

The following is the third of a three-part series produced by Carlos Lujan Tutusaus, Senior Manager of Homologation, Commercial Vehicles, Automated Driving and Vehicle Dynamics in Applus IDIADA and Oriol Flix Viñas, Homologation Engineer, Commercial Vehicles, Automated Driving & Vehicle Dynamics in Applus IDIADA

This article describes the main future trends in the new assessment and testing methodologies for the type-approval of vehicles and their systems. The first part of the article introduced the context, as well as the challenge of automated vehicle type approval; the second part, on the other hand, presented the rule making structure.

VMAD AND THE NEW ASSESSMENT AND TESTING METHODOLOGIES

As stated in the previous section of this article, one of the topics of the safety vision of the framework document is the validation for system safety. As it was earlier introduced, the automated and autonomous technologies require a new approach to the validation methodology, different from the classical tests for a prototype under repeatable conditions. The seed for this new technology is the “three pillar approach”, first introduced in the GRVA discussions upon an initiative from OICA.

According to this approach, the use of different tools is required to guarantee the safe market introduction of automated and autonomous vehicles:

 a) Audit/assessment:

● Understand the system to be certified.

● Assess that the applied processes and design/test methods for the overall system development (HW and SW) are effective, complete and consistent.

● Assess the system's strategies, test performance to address (multiple) fault conditions and disturbances due to deteriorating external influences; vehicle behaviour in variations of critical scenarios.