{"ID":6620532,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-15T01:01:48.440468303Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-15T03:28:55.185153975Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12452","arxiv_id":"2607.12452","title":"Automatic Testing of Interacting Autonomous Vehicles","abstract":"Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must be thoroughly tested to meet high safety standards and avoid endangering both AV passengers and road users. Scenario-based testing implements driving scenarios in virtual simulation environments as a cost-effective alternative to field testing. Common scenario-based testing approaches set the environment and the surrounding traffic and test a single AV. Recent studies show that the approaches that test single AVs miss critical behaviors that emerge from interactions among multiple AVs. Effective approaches to test scenarios that emerge from n-way interactions must address the combinatorial explosion that the presence of multiple AVs further exacerbates. In this paper, we propose EVITA, an approach that leverages multi-objective optimization to generate scenarios that trigger multiple and diverse AVs interactions, while minimizing the complexity of the generated scenarios, to effectively test multiple interacting AVs and reveal safety-critical scenarios that current approaches overlook. The experimental results that we discuss in this paper confirm that EVITA triggers a higher variety of AVs interactions than state-of-the-art approaches, thus improving the likelihood to reveal safety-critical behaviors.","short_abstract":"Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must be thoroughly tested to meet high safety standards and avoid endangering both AV passengers and road users. Scenario-based testing implements driving scenarios in virtual simulation environments as a cost-effective alternative to field testing. Common scenario-based testing approaches set...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12452","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.12452v1","authors":"[\"Fabio Cavaleri\",\"Alessio Gambi\",\"Paolo Arcaini\",\"Dejan Ničković\",\"Mauro Pezzè\"]","published":"2026-07-14T07:28:43Z","proceeding":"cs.SE","tasks":"[\"cs.SE\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}