Using Traffic Sequence Charts for the Development of HAVs

Within the german automotive industry there is a convergence on proposing catalogs of scenarios as a key element for acceptance testing of highly autonomous vehicles (HAV). This approach is currently taken in the german PEGASUS project and the ECSEL project ENABLE-S3, and will be matured in follow up projects currently under evaluation. A traffic scenario catalog lists possible traffic evolutions. In this paper, (i) we illustrate how a scenario catalog captured via Traffic Sequence Charts (TSCs) can advantageously accompany the development process of HAVs and (ii) we give an overview of the main features of TSCs. TSCs are a new formal visual specification language, especially tailored for the specification of scenario catalogs. TSCs visualize first-order real-time temporal logic formulas (they are hence tool independent) and are intuitively comprehensible by visualizing scenarios.