Interactive Test Tool for Interoperable C-ITS Development

Abstract

This paper presents the architecture of an Interactive Test Tool (ITT) for interoperability testing of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS). Cooperative systems are developed by different manufacturers at different locations, which makes interoperability testing a tedious task. Up until now, interoperability testing is performed during physical meetings where the C-ITS devices are placed within range of wireless communication, and messages are exchanged. The ITT allows distributed (e.g. over Internet) interoperability testing starting from the network Transport Layer and all the way up to the Application Layer, e.g. to platooning. ITT clients can be implemented as Hardware-in-the-Loop, thus allowing to combine physical and virtual vehicles. Since the ITT considers each client as a black box, manufacturers can test together without revealing internal implementations to each other. The architecture of the ITT allows users to easily switch between physical wireless networking and virtual ITT networking. Therefore, only one implementation of the ITS communication stack is required for both development and testing, which reduces the work overhead and ensures that the stack that is used during the testing is the one deployed in the real world.