Creation Review

Cloe is an enhanced middleware solution for closed-loop simulations, with a focus on functional software tests on system level. Cloe is used as a development tool for interactive and scripted workstation simulations, for code debugging, and for automated tests on servers. Cloe covers a central part of the verification and validation strategy, needed by all vendors in the field of Automated Driving.

• Cloe acts as closed-loop simulation master and middleware for all involved components, such as simulator engine, vehicle controller, and component models.

• Cloe provides a tool for orchestrating such closed-loop simulations in a variety of environments, e.g. on localhost or in a Kubernetes cluster.

• Cloe provides a lightweight web-based user-interface for visualizing the simulation state.

• Simulations are described through Cloe stack-files for reproducibility.

These core characteristics of Cloe allow it to (partially) fulfil the closed-loop simulation in the V&V strategy. Vehicle controllers and models can be easily integrated with Cloe and immediately have access to multiple simulator engines. Given M simulator engines and N vehicle controllers, Cloe allows the number of integrations to be reduced to M+N, rather than M×N that would otherwise be necessary. Multiple simulator engines are supported, proprietary as well as open source. This allows a user to mix-and-match engines to their system-under-test based on test requirements. Cloe provides generalized interfaces allowing ground truth and key-performance indicator extraction, as well as fault injection.

Orchestration features provided by Cloe allow faster scaling of simulation tests and evaluation. Through containerization and the simulation description files, development artifacts along with their tests can be easily archived and the results quickly reproduced.