Ontology based Scene Creation for the Development of Automated Vehicles

Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract --The introduction of automated vehicles without permanent human supervision demands a functional system description, including functional system boundaries and a comprehensive safety analysis. These inputs to the technical development can be identified and analyzed by a scenario-based approach. Furthermore, to establish an economical test and release process, a large number of scenarios must be identified to obtain meaningful test results. Experts are doing well to identify scenarios that are difficult to handle or unlikely to happen. However, experts are unlikely to identify all scenarios possible based on the knowledge they have on hand. Expert knowledge modeled for computer aided processing may help for the purpose of providing a wide range of scenarios. This contribution reviews ontologies as knowledge-based systems in the field of automated vehicles, and proposes a generation of traffic scenes in natural language as a basis for a scenario creation. Safety assessment of automated driving functions is an emerging topic in the automotive industry. Several research and development projects show prototypes of automated vehicles in well-defined showcases. When it comes to series production, the ISO 26262 standard defines a state-of-the-art development process to ensure functional safety. Automated vehicles will have to fulfill a safe driving task in a high number of operating scenarios. To comply with the hazard analysis and risk assessment demanded by the ISO 26262 standard, hazardous events "shall be determined systematically by using adequate techniques" [1, Part 3].