Schulte-Tigges, Joschua (FH Aachen), Rumpf, Moritz (FH Aachen), Reke, Michael (FH Aachen), Ferrein, Alexander Antoine (FH Aachen)

Implementation of an ODD Definition Language within an ODD Engine for Runtime OD Checking in Automated Driving Systems

Scheduled for presentation during the Invited Session "S17b-Synthetic-Data-Aided Safety-Critical Scenario Understanding in ITS" (TH-EA-T17), Thursday, November 20, 2025, 14:30−14:50, Southport 2

2025 IEEE 28th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), November 18-21, 2025, Gold Coast, Australia

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on October 18, 2025

Abstract

Each automated driving system (ADS) is developed for an individual operational design domain (ODD). Therefore, a safe operation of the automation system is only possible, while the vehicle's operational domain (OD) remains in its ODD. In this paper, we present the implementation of an ODD Definition Language within an ODD-Engine, which parses a given ontology and ODD definition first and executes ongoing checks of the OD during runtime. For evaluation, the ODD-Engine was fully integrated into an automated driving system. For the formal definition of ODDs taxonomies, ontologies and domain specific languages are already known from literature. And it is also common sense, that the operational domain of vehicles has to be monitored and the vehicle has to react if it leaves its ODD. With our work, we will show that it is possible, with extensions to known ODD definition languages, to create not only a formal definition of the ODD but also to describe the reaction and degradation of the automation system by restrictions. This enables the implementation of a fully functional ODD-Engine. We will show that our publicly available implementation of the ODD-Engine is able to manage a huge number of ODD and ontology attributes within a short execution time. Furthermore, we also present first experimental results of the integration to a real automated driving system.