Historically the gold standard for vehicle testing has been to capture vehicle CAN data for playback. CAN data is useful for test engineers to determine the activity of the vehicle network but only provides one piece of the puzzle. It’s analogous to listening to The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” but hearing only Ringo’s drum percussion.

Fleet durability, hybrid-electric systems, HMI, autonomous vehicles and functional safety systems are amongst the most demanding applications for vehicle testing that require synchronous data. Active safety systems raise the bar even higher because of the extreme consequences in the event of failure.

Active safety systems, also referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), for both commercial vehicles and passenger cars are designed to monitor and understand the state of the vehicle in order to prevent and minimize the effects of a collision.

Many factors exponentially increase the complexity of testing and validation for active safety systems. Modern vehicles have numerous parameters, software variants and combinations of electro mechanical systems. Object detection and identification, environmental factors and weather add variability to the equation. The most significant variable is the behavior and reactions of drivers in response to a potential hazard.

Regulations have been deployed globally while many more are in development:

o   In 2013 the European Commission initiated the fitment of lane departure warning and automatic emergency braking systems for new heavy trucks and buses.

o   The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is developing performance requirements and test procedures for forward collision warning, automatic emergency braking systems, lane departure warning, lane keeping assist and lane guidance systems for light and heavy trucks.

o   The SAE Truck and Bus Active Safety Systems Committee is in the process of developing test procedures for advanced emergency braking systems (collision warning, collision imminent braking, collision mitigation) and lane departure warning systems