Congratulations to WASP researchers Daniel Varro, Dominik Frey, and Ulf Kargén, all from Linköping University, who were awarded the ACM Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2025).
Their paper, “Assessing Scene Generation Techniques for Testing COLREGS-Compliance of Autonomous Surface Vehicles”, explores how scene generation techniques, widely used in the automotive domain, can be adapted to evaluate COLREGS-compliance, the international rules for preventing collisions at sea between autonomous surface vessels. The research addresses a critical challenge in maritime autonomy: how to effectively test multi-vessel encounters in open waters.
Safer and reliable autonomous navigation at sea
“Our experiments involving synthetic and real-world test scenarios evaluate the relevance, diversity, completeness, scalability and speed of such techniques,” says Daniel Varro, WASP researcher at Linköping University.
The results indicate that test scenarios derived from historic maritime traffic are insufficient for testing multi-ship encounters.
“Moreover, existing test scenario generation techniques provide sufficient scalability and speed, but they are very limited in terms of diversity and completeness when the number of vessels increases,” Daniel continues.
This work contributes to safer and more reliable autonomous navigation at sea and opens new avenues for cross-domain testing methodologies.
Read the paper here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3728919
About ISSTA 2025
Held in Trondheim, Norway, from June 25–28, ISSTA is the leading international symposium on software testing and analysis (CORE Rank A), and this award highlights the impact of the WASP’s contribution to cross-domain testing methodologies. Read more about ISSTA.
Published: September 3rd, 2025
