Formal specification of situations in scenario-based testing of maritime assistance systems

Kurzfassung

With the advent of assistance systems that classify into the four degrees of IMO maritime autonomous surface ships comes the challenge how to verify and certify such systems, which, in many cases, rely on AI-components for perception or recommendations. One approach to verification and validation of such systems proposes to define test cases as traffic scenarios, i.e., evolutions over time of traffic situations. A necessary prerequisite to apply scenario-based approaches is an appropriate (at best formal and precise) specification of the scenarios to be considered in testing. In this work, we report from a case-study with a graphical scenario specification formalism (as originally defined for the automotive domain and recently extended for maritime scenarios) following the question whether we can formalise relevant situations from a real test campaign using this formalism and see how understandable the results are for maritime practitioners not trained in formal methods.