FLYOVER: A Model-Driven Method to Generate Diverse Highway Interchanges for Autonomous Vehicle Testing

It has become a consensus that autonomous vehicles (AVs) will first be widely deployed on highways. However, the complexity of highway interchanges becomes the bottleneck for their deployment. An AV should be sufficiently tested under different highway interchanges, which is still challenging due to the lack of available datasets containing diverse highway interchanges. In this paper, we propose a model-driven method, FLYOVER, to generate a dataset of diverse interchanges with measurable diversity coverage. First, FLYOVER uses a labeled digraph to model interchange topology. Second, FLYOVER takes real-world interchanges as input to guarantee topology practicality and extracts different topology equivalence classes by classifying corresponding topology models. Third, for each topology class, FLYOVER identifies the corresponding geometrical features for the ramps and generates concrete interchanges using k-way combinatorial coverage and differential evolution. To illustrate the diversity and applicability of the generated interchange dataset, we test the built-in traffic flow control algorithm in SUMO and the fuel-optimization trajectory tracking algorithm deployed to Alibaba's autonomous trucks on the dataset. The results show that except for the geometrical difference, the interchanges are diverse in throughput and fuel consumption under the traffic flow control and trajectory tracking algorithms, respectively.