Model-Guided Scenario Expansion for Data-Driven Autonomous-Vehicle Safety Testing: A Feasibility Demonstration

<div>This article presents a data-driven pipeline for autonomous-vehicle (AV) safety testing. The pipeline integrates real-world traffic observations with model-guided scenario expansion and safety-metric evaluation to enable an end-to-end AV safety testing framework, demonstrated on a canonical highway scenario. The framework enhances test diversity, realism, and coverage by generating statistically informed variants of observed driving behaviors. Key parameters such as vehicle speed, trajectories, and headways are extracted from naturalistic data and used to train a probabilistic model of traffic dynamics. Scenario variants are sampled from this model and encoded as behavior trees (BTs) for modular, simulation-ready execution. Each scenario is simulated using a consistent AV control configuration, and safety metrics such as minimum safe distance violation, minimum safe distance factor, time to collision, and aggressive driving are applied to evaluate safety outcomes independently of system-specific tuning. A case study based on the <i>highD</i> dataset (110,000+ trajectories) demonstrates the framework’s ability to generate realistic and safety-relevant scenarios, providing an initial demonstration of pipeline feasibility and metric-based evaluation. This initial study is intentionally scoped to a single scenario class and a simplified parametric model to isolate and validate the end-to-end integration of the pipeline.</div>