RKGRScen: Road-Network Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Based Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving Testing

Simulation-based scenario testing is central to the safety validation of autonomous driving systems (ADS), where abstract scenarios must be instantiated into executable concrete scenarios. A key challenge in this process is road matching, which aims to identify a concrete site on a map that genuinely satisfies the road-semantic requirements of a scenario. Existing methods often reduce this step to template-based mapping or coarse geometric filtering, which capture coarse road types but fail to meet the finer structural and topological constraints of a scenario, thereby undermining the executability and behavioral fidelity of the generated scenarios. To address this, we propose RKGRScen (Road-Network Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Based Scenario Generation), which formalizes road matching as a semantic location retrieval problem over a road-network knowledge graph. Its indexing module constructs a road-network knowledge graph from OpenDRIVE maps and partitions it into topologically coherent communities annotated with LLM-generated semantic summaries and violation tags, organizing them into a searchable semantic community index. Its instantiation module then grounds each scenario onto concrete road sites through two-level global-to-local retrieval and resolves executable parameters and conflict-point timing with a constraint solver. In a scenario-quality evaluation on a CARLA Town01–Town05 map pool comprising 2649 scenarios, RKGRScen achieves an executability rate of 93.88%, an end-to-end behavior reproduction rate of 72.59%, and a road–environment matching rate of 93.43%. Therefore, RKGRScen can reliably ground high-level scenarios into executable scenarios that satisfy complex road and topological constraints, providing effective support for the safety validation of autonomous driving systems.

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Publication Details

Journal
Vehicles
Published
2026-09-24
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/vehicles8100228
Primary Topic
Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

RKGRScen: Road-Network Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Based Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving Testing

Kunyuan Li, Tongtong Bai, Changyou Zheng, Yaqing Shi et al.
Vehicles
Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety
article

RKGRScen: Road-Network Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Based Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving Testing

Kunyuan Li, Tongtong Bai, Changyou Zheng, Yaqing Shi, Song Huang, Zhe Wang, Kui Yao, Yao He
article en

Abstract

Simulation-based scenario testing is central to the safety validation of autonomous driving systems (ADS), where abstract scenarios must be instantiated into executable concrete scenarios. A key challenge in this process is road matching, which aims to identify a concrete site on a map that genuinely satisfies the road-semantic requirements of a scenario. Existing methods often reduce this step to template-based mapping or coarse geometric filtering, which capture coarse road types but fail to meet the finer structural and topological constraints of a scenario, thereby undermining the executability and behavioral fidelity of the generated scenarios. To address this, we propose RKGRScen (Road-Network Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Based Scenario Generation), which formalizes road matching as a semantic location retrieval problem over a road-network knowledge graph. Its indexing module constructs a road-network knowledge graph from OpenDRIVE maps and partitions it into topologically coherent communities annotated with LLM-generated semantic summaries and violation tags, organizing them into a searchable semantic community index. Its instantiation module then grounds each scenario onto concrete road sites through two-level global-to-local retrieval and resolves executable parameters and conflict-point timing with a constraint solver. In a scenario-quality evaluation on a CARLA Town01–Town05 map pool comprising 2649 scenarios, RKGRScen achieves an executability rate of 93.88%, an end-to-end behavior reproduction rate of 72.59%, and a road–environment matching rate of 93.43%. Therefore, RKGRScen can reliably ground high-level scenarios into executable scenarios that satisfy complex road and topological constraints, providing effective support for the safety validation of autonomous driving systems.

VehiclesVol. 8(10)
PLA Army Engineering University (CN)
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 20%
Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety
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