Ideation

Project Scope

This activity aims to initiate the development of an ASAM OpenX Ontology that shall provide a foundation of common definitions, properties, and relations for central concepts of the ASAM OpenX standards, including OpenDRIVE, OpenSCENARIO, OpenLABEL and others.

Motivation

ASAM’s OpenX standards describe the domain of road traffic. They cover concepts like road infrastructure, traffic participants, and scenarios for driving simulations. The standards play an increasing role in the automotive and driving Simulation industries.

All OpenX standards come from the same domain - road traffic. However, they are not founded on a common domain model. Thus, central concepts are redundantly defined and described in each of the standards. Definitions sometimes contradict each other. Overlapping definitions currently exist, for example, for lane references (OpenSCENARIO and OpenDRIVE).

This deficiency makes it difficult to link data stored in formats of the different OpenX standards. Also, compatibility within data sets complying to the same Standard, but coming from different suppliers, cannot be guaranteed. An example of this are scenario labels for driving simulations. The concepts used in scenarios, their parameters, and their relations are not standardized. This makes it considerably more difficult to:

• Extract scenarios from logged data in a standardized way
• Manually create unambiguous scenarios
• Automatically generate synthetic scenarios in a traceable manner
• Use common labels for objects and scenes
• Retrieve scenarios based on common queries

These difficulties apply to both humans and machines responsible for defining, labelling, and retrieving scenarios. They also apply to both existing and future standards related to road traffic.

An ASAM ontology that describes among others the concepts of traffic infrastructure, interactions of traffic participants, and environmental conditions can fill this gap by providing a standardized basis for a vocabulary and a domain model for the OpenX standards. This will also facilitate the use of artificial intelligence for OpenX applications.
 

For questions, please contact benjamin.engel(at)asam.net