CPS: Medium: Co-Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles Certification and Control (COSACC)

• funded by: NSF (award abstract)
• funding level: $1,000,000
• duration: 8/15/2025 - 07/31/2028
• co-PIs: Zhishan Guo, Danjue Chen, George List

The overall aim of this work is to devise a co-simulation environment for AV certification and control with well-defined requirements and standards. The objective of this work is twofold: (1) We will create an environment supporting seamless transitions from lab testing over development in a hybrid environment, part lab part physical, to fully deployed AV road testing. (2) We will systematically identify minimum requirements and testing scenarios for lab, hybrid, and entirely physically deployed AVs that not only support the development cycles but also facilitate AV certification.

• Ahsan, S. N., Al Hasan, M. A., Chen, D., & List, G. F. (2027). "National and State-Level Approaches to Automated Vehicle Certification: A Comparative Framework for State Operational Governance." Ms. No. TRBAM-27-04601. Accepted for presentation, 106th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, Washington, DC.
• He, Z., Chen, D.*, Wu, K., & Zhou, Y., 2026. "Vulnerabilities of Autonomous Vehicles under Adversarial Attacks on Trajectory Prediction and Motion Planning." 105th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, Washington, DC.
• Abdullah Al Arafat, Kurt Wilson, Shareef Ahmed, Zhishan Guo. Supporting Mixed-Criticality and Mutually Exclusive Callback Groups in Multi-Thread ROS 2. The 32nd IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), Saint Malo, France, May 2026.
• Harun Teper, Daniel Kuhse, Yun-Chih Chen, Georg von der Brüggen, Zhishan Guo, Jian-Jia Chen. Anytime ROS 2: Timely Task Completion in Non-Preemptive Robotic Systems. The 32nd IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), Saint Malo, France, May 2026.
• Xuntao Lyu, Ching-Chi Lin, Abdullah Al Arafat, Georg von der Brüggen, Jian-Jia Chen, Zhishan Guo. CertMask: Certifiable Defense Against Adversarial Patches via Theoretically Optimal Mask Coverage, Proceedings of the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Singapore, Jan. 2026.
• Verification-Driven Scenario Optimization Across a Co-Simulation Continuum for AV Certification by Kurt Wilson, Zhishan Guo, Danjue Chen, George List, Frank Mueller in Workshop on Optimization for Embedded and Real-time systems (OPERA), Dec 2025.
• curtSCHED: Architecture-Independent Real-Time GPU Scheduling via Statistical Deferrable Servers Hao Zhang, Frank Mueller in International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS), Nov 2025. github

• TBA

"Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."