Setting AI in context: A case study on defining the context and operational design domain for automated driving

TL;DR

This case study explores the challenges in defining and documenting the operational context and design domain for automated driving systems, highlighting industry inconsistencies and proposing practitioner-driven solutions.

Contribution

It identifies key challenges in standardizing context definitions and documents potential solutions from industry practitioners for better operational domain management.

Findings

Lack of standardization in context definitions across the industry

Ambiguities in processes for deriving the operational design domain

Missing documentation of operational assumptions

Abstract

[Context and motivation] For automated driving systems, the operational context needs to be known in order to state guarantees on performance and safety. The operational design domain (ODD) is an abstraction of the operational context, and its definition is an integral part of the system development process. [Question / problem] There are still major uncertainties in how to clearly define and document the operational context in a diverse and distributed development environment such as the automotive industry. This case study investigates the challenges with context definitions for the development of perception functions that use machine learning for automated driving. [Principal ideas/results] Based on qualitative analysis of data from semi-structured interviews, the case study shows that there is a lack of standardisation for context definitions across the industry, ambiguities in the processes that lead to deriving the ODD, missing documentation of assumptions about the operational context, and a lack of involvement of function developers in the context definition. [Contribution] The results outline challenges experienced by an automotive supplier company when defining the operational context for systems using machine learning. Furthermore, the study collected ideas for potential solutions from the perspective of practitioners.