Recipient organisationUniversity of WarwickSource-published name: University of Warwick
Funding£1.3M
PeriodAug 2022 — Aug 2025
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Self-driving cars cannot be tested for safety by simply driving them around the real world—there are too many rare but dangerous scenarios to encounter by chance. SUNRISE tackles this fundamental roadblock to deploying highly automated vehicles. Current certification efforts are fragmented, with no common standard for proving that these systems are safe in every possible situation. The project builds on earlier work (HEADSTART) to create a unified Safety Assurance Framework that combines virtual simulation, physical testing, and a shared European database of driving scenarios. It also integrates functional safety and cybersecurity into the same validation process. If successful, SUNRISE would give regulators, manufacturers, and policymakers a single, scalable method to certify automated vehicles for public roads. This could accelerate the rollout of connected and automated mobility systems—not just cars, but delivery pods, shuttles, and other autonomous transport—by replacing today’s patchwork of national approaches with a harmonised European standard. The infrastructure that quietly underpins this shift—data interfaces, simulation tools, scenario libraries—would become interoperable and reusable across projects, reducing duplication and cost.
View original technical description
Safety assurance of Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) technologies and systems is a crucial factor for their successful adoption in society, yet it remains to be a significant challenge. CCAM must prove to be safe and reliable in every possible driving scenario. It is already acknowledged that for higher levels of automation the validation of these systems by real test-driving would be infeasible by conventional methods. Furthermore, certification initiatives worldwide struggle to define a harmonized approach to enable massive deployment of highly automated vehicles. Building from HEADSTART and other initiatives, SUNRISE (Safety assUraNce fRamework for connected, automated mobIlity SystEms) will develop and demonstrate a commonly accepted, extensible Safety Assurance Framework for the test and safety validation of a varied scope of CCAM systems. This will be achieved by: 1) Bringing the needs of heterogeneous CCAM use cases; 2) Defining a scenario-based database framework that will broaden the HEADSTART methodology; 3) Holistically addressing the CCAM test scenario generation; 4) preparing the required tools for comprehensive testing (virtual and physical), taking into account robustness, scalability, interoperability, quality and standardization; 5) integrating functional safety and cybersecurity; 6)involving the use cases from the initial stages, acting as a guiding principle within the project. The project will define, implement and demonstrate the building blocks of this Safety Assurance Framework: harmonized and scalable safety assessment methodologies, procedures and metrics taylored for use cases, a federated European Scenario Database framework and its necessary data interfaces, a commonly agreed simulation framework including tools and interfaces. SUNRISE will work closely with CCAM stakeholders as policy makers, regulators, consumer testing, user associations and all relevant stakeholders.
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