StreamCars: A new flexible architecture for driver assistance systems

One of the main challenges in the development of traffic systems is to assure safety for all road users. Hence, especially expensive vehicles are equipped with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that use data about the vehicle and information about objects in the proximity of the vehicle to execute the assistance function. These objects have to be detected by sensors and they have to be tracked over multiple scans to keep the object's state up-to-date. Usually, such ADAS are developed as proprietary systems that are tailored for the specific assistance function and the specific sensors in use. Indeed, that leads to a very efficient system. However, changing system properties, e. g. an exchange of sensors, is very expensive. In this case, very often at least some parts of the system code have to be reimplemented. To solve this problem of bad maintainability which arises especially during the development of new assistance functions in this work a new architecture for ADAS is presented. The relevant information for the assistance function is no longer provided by hard coded, predefined processes, but by flexible continuous operator plans in a datastream management system. These operator plans build up a dynamic context model of the vehicle's environment. The context model is kept up-to-date by object tracking operators in these operator plans and is then used as a data source to extract information for different assistance functions. This extraction is also done by operator plans that produce only relevant information and discard other information.