Road-Geometry, Scenario-Diversity, and Failure-History Prioritization for BeamNG Lane-Keeping Simulation Regression Tests under Fixed Simulation-Time Budgets: An Empirical Comparison
Published 2026-08-24
Keywords
- autonomous-driving testing,
- regression-test prioritization,
- simulation-time budget,
- failure history
How to Cite
Copyright (c) 2026 Spectrum of Research

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Simulation enables repeatable testing of automated driving functions, yet continuous regression campaigns may contain more executable scenarios than a development cycle can afford. This study evaluates whether inexpensive pre-execution information can allocate a fixed simulation-time budget toward failure-revealing BeamNG lane-keeping tests. The evaluation uses 5,638 complete records from the TRAVEL SDC-Prioritizer archive, including 2,543 unsafe executions and 69.96 hours of recorded simulation. A leakage-controlled rolling protocol evaluates 4,641 tests on four future dates after fitting history-dependent methods only on earlier records. Five prioritization strategies are compared at 10%, 25%, and 50% of each fold's execution time: random ordering, a road-geometry score, farthest-first geometric diversity, failure probability learned from prior executions, and failure probability divided by predicted duration. At the 25% budget, random ordering recalls 25.0% of unsafe tests, geometry recalls 33.9%, history recalls 43.3%, and cost-aware history recalls 44.2%; diversity recalls 21.3%. The advantage of cost adjustment over unadjusted history is only 0.9 percentage points. Exact paired tests across four temporal folds do not establish statistical significance after multiplicity correction. The evidence supports historical failure information as a useful scheduling signal for this archive, while exposing limited sample size, a single safety oracle, and the absence of consecutive software revisions.
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