Project Proposal: ASAM OpenSCENARIO V1.x

This is a proposal for an successor OpenSCENARIO 1.x project to ensure further development, maintenance and a sustainable migration path to the next major release of the standard.

OpenSCENARIO was transferred to ASAM by an industry consortium in late 2018. By February 2020, OpenSCENARIO evolved to the standard ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1.0.0 within the ASAM OpenSCENARIO Transfer project. The project focused on the completion of existing artifacts, e.g. the addition of missing descriptions and clarifications. The implementation of new features was not included.

After completion of the ASAM OpenSCENARIO Transfer project, ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1.0.0 was released in March 2020. This version was the first complete and fully documented version of OpenSCENARIO. First significant user feedback came from the use and implementation of this version by research institutes, tool vendors and OEMs. The feedback was transformed into issues in the ASAM GitLab of the standard project. Many of them were handled during the recent OpenSCENARIO 1.x project and finalized in the OpenSCENARIO V1.1.0 release. Due to the great interest and the resulting amount of issues created (~60 at start of project, ~120 created during project), not all issues could be handled. Therefore, the author of this proposal strongly suggests the continued development and maintenance of ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1 to support, sustain and increase the application of the standard by the above mentioned parties.

During the recent OpenSCENARIO 1.x project, the remaining issues were reviewed and prioritized by the project group members in preparation for a successor 1.x project. This list shall be considered as work backlog for the new OpenSCENARIO 1.x project. It’s suggested by the author of this proposal to use this backlog to realize features that have already been discussed and prioritized by domain experts and OpenSCENARIO users.

Finally, within the ASAM Simulation Coordination Group, it was decided to develop a convergence path between ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1 and ASAM OpenSCENARIO 2 in a joint effort of the two corresponding projects such that "[…​] run time behavior of any scenario converted between the latest 1.x and 2.0 OSC languages shall be the same.[…​]". The first release of a corresponding ruleset shall be delivered with the first release of the ASAM OpenSCENARIO 2.0 project. To enable this, the new 1.X project includes a work package that is tasked with harmonization between OpenSCENARIO 1 and OpenSCENARIO 2. Technical changes may have to be discussed throughout the projects in order to support the integration of OpenSCENARIO 1.x features in OpenSCENARIO 2.0

In order to achieve sustainability throughout releases of ASAM OpenSCENARIO, the author of this proposal strongly supports this plan. Nevertheless, it cannot be guaranteed that the convergence path can be fully elaborated within the proposed project. This may require further releases 1.x of OpenSCENARIO, which will be developed in subsequent OpenSCENARIO 1.x projects.

In the context of ASAM standards this describes requirements that the output of the project should satisfy. In general these requirements should be derived from the use cases described in this document.

A clear understanding of the nature of different OpenScenario elements is fundamental for the development of simulation scenarios. The OpenScenario format should focus in eliminating redundancy and improving clarity for the sake of users and standard health. These are elementary requirements that should govern the growth of the standard and its maintenance, and are therefore ubiquitous in such projects, even if mostly present in the project’s backdrop. However, this project will tackle these issues head-on, in particular for the case of controllers, actions, entities, and their interactions; corner stones of the standard and currently wanting in transparency. Additionally, the project will also address the runtime model of a simulation and the role played by OpenScenario therein; a requirement to aid scenario designers and those developping the tools which interpret and implement the standard.

In the described Use-Cases ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1 is used together with other standardised formats to fulfil the goal of the Use-Case. Therefore a requirement is that ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1 is compatible and consistent with other formats.

The proposed ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1.x project is the successor project to the previous OpenSCENARIO 1.x project. Other related standards are ASAM OpenDRIVE, ASAM OpenCRG and ASAM OpenSimulationInterface standard.

OpenSCENARIO defines a data model and a derived data format for describing the dynamic content of a virtual world. Actions are a key feature to modify or even create dynamic elements in the scenario. They are used to change lateral and longitudinal dynamics of a vehicle, change the time of day or setup a traffic situation. In the current version of the standard most of the Actions depend on the static components, like the road network at runtime.

From a scenario implementation perspective it is challenging to know at which location the action will be executed at runtime. For this reason we will work on a more abstract way to define actions more independently from predefined content like the road network. Moreover we have several user requests to add more actions to OpenSCENARIO for parking, weather conditions, traffic and non-movement actions (e.g. open door of a vehicle).

These actions are necessary to describe more sophisticated scenarios, make them more explicit and suporting those will evolve the standard. The clarification of some of the already implemented actions will round up this work package.

With the expansion of the current existence of the ASAM OpenSCENARIO V1.1.0 standard, it is suggested to include more parameters and conditions to increase the ability to cover more complex scenarios. This requires the ability to involve parameters, especially ranges and distributions.

A clear understanding of the OpenScenario format is critical to the representation of meaningful simulations. For this, it is imperative to:

As the format adopted by the simulation community, it is imperative to keep up with users and provide clarifications on the standard’s concepts as issues arise. This group will focus on maintaining a clear definition of the underlying conceptual runtime model by ensuring that the existing definitions are still relevant.

Additional effort will be placed in highlighting system boundaries, i.e. what is under the responsibility of different simulation components and how they relate to the OpenSCENARIO standard. A sharp definition of system boundaries promotes uniform levels of understanding between users which facilitates interaction, and tool adoption.

Finally, general questions that arise from using the standard will be address by this group. These are usually questions that are not tightly coupled to one concept, but instead arise from the interaction of different elements of the OpenSCENARIO model, and thus require a more holistic approach in their solutions.

A further work package in the project will be the harmonization of the ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1 standard with the other ASAM OpenX standards.

As already mentioned above the development of the ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1 standard needs to be aligned with the parallel OpenSCENARIO 2 development. The goal is that the two standards converge instead of diverge for being able to eventually merge them at a later stage.

Furthermore there are several existing ASAM standards in the simulation domain like OpenDRIVE, OpenCRG and OpenSimulationInterface, which complement OpenSCENARIO. Therefore the interfaces between these standards need to be compatible and changes in the interfaces need to be reflected in both affected standards.

Finally there are new upcoming standards like OpenONTOLOGY, OpenLABEL and OpenODD. Compatibility between OpenSCENARIO and these standards also needs to be ensured.

Member companies contribute resources for the project as per the following table.

Members of the CCB are project participants with the necessary permissions on the OpenSCENARIO repository to:

The following intellectual property will be transferred from member companies to ASAM:

Tasks for a service provider will include, but are not limited to:

For the proposed ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1.x project the kick-off is planned for mid of Q3/2021. A project duration of one year is planned, i.e. the project deadline is planned for Q2/2022. Within the project, a release 1.2 is planned for end of Q1/2022. After this release, work within the project group shall focus on preparing a proposal for a next 1.x project, providing user support and supporting the migration towards OpenSCENARIO 2.

At the end of the project, the project group will hand over the following deliverables to ASAM:

The following quality assurance measures shall be carried out by the project: