Ideation

Motivation

The purpose of the concept project is to evaluate and to conceptually specify feature requests for the further development of ASAM OpenDRIVE. The expert community has identified and prioritized eight features for which this project shall develop concepts for standardization. In case that the concept development requires increased resources and more time, then this project might spawn additional concept projects by creating the required project proposals. The concepts shall then be incorporated into the future version of ASAM OpenDRIVE 2.0.

Project Content

The concept project will explore several proposed improvements of existing features and the introduction of new features to OpenDRIVE. Those have been identified and prioritized in earlier meetings of users of OpenDRIVE. The features for concept development are in the order of priority:

• Junction Model: The junction model shall be revised, offering easier ways to describe complex lane geometries, while avoiding the need to keep redundant parameters consistent. New objects shall help to ease and unify the topology description of junctions.
• Environment Representation: The standard shall include ways to specify the environment of the road network. Linking to existing 3D environment standards, such as OpenFlight or Wavefront, shall be considered.
• Road Geometry Model: Extend the model to describe roads by further data model elements as known from other description methods, such as polylines, reference trajectories, shape point lists or Beziers curves.
• International Signs Model: The standard shall have a model to describe traffic signs, traffic lights, electronic sign-bridges and painted signs on the road.
• Parametrization & Variation: It shall be possible to generate variations of road descriptions from an OpenDRIVE file for the purpose of testing.
• Arbitrary Spaces Model: Provide elements to define arbitrary spaces, such as parking spots or other drivable areas.
• Georeferencing: The data model of OpenDRIVE shall be extended with geographic coordinates for road descriptions.
• Roundabouts: Add an easy way to describe roundabouts.

During the initial concept exploration and evaluation phase of this project, the concerned topic will be evaluated against existing standards. Furthermore, experts and newcomers will share knowledge and experience and decide on the technical gap to be filled. The output of this phase will directly be fed into the concept phase, were the technical work on the feature will be started, or spawn a new concept project when additional resources are necessary.

Who Should Participate?

Participation in this concept project would be of interest for those members, who intensively use or develop road network editing tools or Simulation tools for driving and traffic Simulation. The project offers a unique opportunity to improve the features of such tools by further developing the Standard on which they are based upon. Furthermore, road network data providers should have an interest in this project in order to ensure that the OpenDRIVE format can represent their data or can easily be converted to this format.