From Concept to Prototype: Building a Retargetable Translator for Driving Simulation Languages

Automated driving systems have introduced significant changes to the automotive industry, offering potential improvements in safety, efficiency, and convenience. The development of advanced driver assistance systems increasingly relies on integrating driving simulation into the systems and software engineering process. We highlight the pivotal role of driving simulation in meeting safety standards, particularly SOTIF (ISO 21448), and adhering to legal regulations. A key factor here is the ability to describe suitable driving scenarios as base of the simulation.
Thus, one can design and deploy a wide range of scenarios for comprehensive testing in a safe and controlled setting. Though a challenge comes with the many different, often proprietary, driving simulation languages, that complicate the replication of comparable experiments across diverse simulation platforms. A tool that translates between different simulation languages has to be flexible enough to adapt to new languages, dialects, and standards but also has to guarantee a well-defined and correct translation.
We present a prototype of a retargetable translator designed for translating between different driving simulation languages. Furthermore, we have developed a concept for a formal semantics to verify the correctness of the translation process. This eliminates the need to formally verify the translator itself.