A new revolution has taken place in the automobile industry in recent years,
intelligent and connected vehicle (ICV) [1] has achieved a higher market share in recent years and relevant
technologies have been quickly developed and widely accepted, so the auto
industry needs to make regulations for automated driving system (ADS) on ICVs,
mainly to assure the safety of ICV. To meet the requirements above, the
definition of operational design domain (ODD) [2, 3] was put forward by the
Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) a few years ago. ODD defines necessary external
environment conditions for the ADS to operate, but the internal status of the
vehicle is also a key part of judging whether ADS can operate safely. Based on
that, we propose a novel definition named operational design condition (ODC),
which can supersede ODD to play a bigger role in improving regulations and
standards, and promoting vehicle safety and technological development. We
summarize the research about ODD, analyze the relationship between ODC and ODD,
and list the advantages of the proposed definition of ODC. ODC is designed based
on the principle of layered description, concerns for safety, perceivable, and
minimal collection, which will promote technologies and cooperation based on a
deeper and common understanding.
