Investigating Driving Interactions: A Robust Multi-Agent Simulation Framework for Autonomous Vehicles

Current validation methods often rely on recorded data and basic functional checks, which may not be sufficient to encompass the scenarios an autonomous vehicle might encounter. In addition, there is a growing need for complex scenarios with changing vehicle interactions for comprehensive validation. This work introduces a novel synchronous multi-agent simulation framework for autonomous vehicles in interactive scenarios. Our approach creates an interactive scenario and incorporates publicly available edge-case scenarios wherein simulated vehicles are replaced by agents navigating to predefined destinations. We provide a platform that enables the integration of different autonomous driving planning methodologies and includes a set of evaluation metrics to assess autonomous driving behavior. Our study explores different planning setups and adjusts simulation complexity to test the framework's adaptability and performance. Results highlight the critical role of simulating vehicle interactions to enhance autonomous driving systems. Our setup offers unique insights for developing advanced algorithms for complex driving tasks to accelerate future investigations and developments in this field. The multi-agent simulation framework is available as open-source software: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/Frenetix-Motion-Planner