Virtual testing requires hazardous scenarios to effectively test autonomous vehicles (AVs). Existing studies have obtained rarer events by sampling methods in a fixed scenario space. In reality, heterogeneous drivers behave differently when facing the same situation. To generate more realistic and efficient scenarios, we propose a two-stage heterogeneous driver model to change the number of dangerous scenarios in the scenario space. We trained the driver model using the HighD dataset, and generated scenarios through simulation. Simulations were conducted in 20 experimental groups with heterogeneous driver models and 5 control groups with the original driver model. The results show that, by adjusting the number and position of aggressive drivers, the percentage of dangerous scenarios was significantly higher compared to that of models not accounting for driver heterogeneity. To further verify the effectiveness of our method, we evaluated two driving strategies: car-following and cut-in scenarios. The results verify the effectiveness of our approach. Cumulatively, the results indicate that our approach could accelerate the testing of AVs.
Keywords: autonomous-driving testing; deep learning; heterogeneous driver model; scenario generation.