Dominik Frey
Academic · Talk

MODPROD 2026 talk: Assessing Scene Generation Techniques for Testing COLREGS-Compliance of ASVs

Period
3–4 Feb 2026
Organisation
MODPROD Workshop 2026 · Linköping University
Location
Linköping University, A-husetCampus Valla, 581 83 Linköping, Sweden
Posted

Talk at the 20th MODPROD workshop, presenting the findings of our ISSTA 2025 study to the Swedish model-based engineering community.

  • Session 5b: Model-based Applications
Cite as

Dominik Frey, Ulf Kargén, and Dániel Varró. 2026. MODPROD 2026 talk: Assessing Scene Generation Techniques for Testing COLREGS-Compliance of ASVs. Proceedings of the 20th MODPROD Workshop on Model-Based Cyber-Physical Product Development.

MODPROD is Linköping University's annual workshop on model-based development of cyber-physical systems, where researchers and practitioners from Swedish industry discuss modelling, simulation and systems engineering. In 2026 I gave my second talk there, a few months into the PhD.

What I presented

  1. Why COLREGS testing is hard. The rules apply within visibility distance, on a collision course, and depend on relative-bearing sectors (bow, stern, port, starboard). With several vessels, roles can contradict each other, which makes the scenario ambiguous. The COLREGS encounter explorer shows the sectors and roles live.
  2. What we tried. Search-based (NSGA-II) and rejection-sampling scene generation adapted from automated driving, plus encounters extracted from real AIS data.
  3. What we found. The synthetic methods are fast but lose diversity and completeness as vessels are added. Real-world data contains almost no relevant multi-vessel encounters. And there are dangerous situations the COLREGS do not cover, such as the double crossing.

References

  1. D. Frey, U. Kargén, D. Varró. 2026. Assessing Scene Generation Techniques for Testing COLREGS-Compliance of Autonomous Surface Vehicles. Proceedings of the 20th MODPROD Workshop 2026, Vol. 38 No. 20, p. 33. wcc.ep.liu.se/index.php/MODPROD/article/view/1745