The Foretellix CTO Blog

I don’t usually link to the Foretellix website from this blog, but I am really happy to do that today.

M-SDL, the Measurable Scenario Description Language, is now finally open (under the Apache 2.0 license). You can download the reference manual here (press release is here).

I’d like to thank all the people who helped make the language what it is today: Foretellix people, customers, M-SDL language partners (some of whom are mentioned in that press release) and members of the ASAM OpenSCENARIO 2.0 concept project.

If you’ve been following this blog, you can probably guess what we designed this language for:

• To enable thorough, measureable, coverage-driven verification of AV / ADAS using multiple testing platforms 
• To allow sharing of scenarios between multiple stakeholders
• To be useful for both AV verification and AV regulation
• To help uncover edge cases and spec bugs
• To enable diverse verification techniques

Perhaps the hardest tradeoff when designing an AV verification language is that it has to be both readable (by various kinds of professionals, some of whom are non-programmers), and powerful (so you’ll be able to express in it any yet-unimagined scenario). The fact that M-SDL qualifies (in my opinion – your comments are very welcome) is largely due to all the constructive, diverse feedback we got.

This is not the final version, of course: much is still missing, and I expect the language to evolve as we work with standards bodies (especially ASAM) and as the needs of AV verification evolve and become clearer – this is, after all, a fairly dynamic field.

Finally, if you are reading this post, you may be the kind of person who has opinions about AV verification, or language design, or both. If so, we’d be happy to get your feedback – see the link at the top.