The challenges of releasing cooperative and highly automated vehicles – A look beyond functional requirements

Abstract:
The release and safeguarding of cooperative and highly automated vehicles is often reduced to proper operation of technical systems. As a matter of fact, the proper operation is just a necessary but not sufficient condition. There are a lot of other requirements that have to be taken into a count, which are not just functional. Requirements like social acceptance, customer preferences, potential conflicts, traffic efficiency have to be taken into a count. All these requirements have to be considered in early stages of the vehicle development process. Otherwise, there will be a large time delay before it is possible to implement these automotive technologies in general. It is possible that some of the non-functional requirements are conflicting each other in some cases. The correlation and principal incompatibilities of some requirements have to be addressed and as a matter of fact, such a behaviour is not unusual. A popular example is the correlation between travel time and fuel efficiency. These requirements are often in direct contradiction to each other and can only be balanced. This publication contains an overview about these requirements and their correlations. It can be shown that the release of cooperative and highly automated vehicles is very complex.