Scenario Concatenation for Vehicle Testing by Solving a Vehicle Routing Problem with Skill and Temporal Synchronization Constraints

In the automotive industry new technology has to be tested thoroughly before a market launch. In addition, many regulations hinder a short time-to-market, as well as the manually operated proving grounds (PG). Therefore, a toolchain is introduced to be able to automate and to increase the efficiency of test scheduling. Three steps are proposed. In the first step, common standards, which represent the road network and the test workflow, are converted into a graph representation. The second step combines a customer request and the collected data to a suitable base for a Vehicle Routing Problem with temporal synchronisation and skill constraints (VRPSS) for the test participants. In the third step, the VRPSS is modelled and solved by Metaheuristic methods. It is shown, that the proposed toolchain can automate the scenario concatenation for PGs.