Context-Aware and Reliable Long-Term Decision-Making for Safe Intelligent Vehicles: A Survey

In complex environments, decision-making for an Intelligent Vehicle (IV) requires reliability to ensure safe and efficient navigation. During vehicle operation, context and vehicle's capabilities influence the feasibility of its possible decisions and actions functions. Context-awareness allows to enhance the reliability of the decision-making process, ensuring that the vehicle has the capabilities to effectively perform the desired action. To warrant the safe operation of a vehicle, the Operational Design Domain (ODD) concept has been introduced. In the literature, it defines the conditions under which the vehicle is designed to operate safely. In this survey the ODD concept serves as a formalism to describe the context according to an established taxonomy. This survey focuses on how the operational context and the vehicle's capabilities determine the manner of how decisions are taken to ensure driving safety, comfort, and reliability. This is a multidimensional problem as the vehicle's capabilities, the road, the road users, and other elements of the context need to be considered. The different approaches and methods used in decision-making for IVs which take into account contextual information are identified as well as the research gaps that still need to be addressed in order to ensure reliable decision-making. Further, recent approaches that consider the ODD framework are presented to highlight the importance of this formalism. Conclusions underscore the importance of this integration for IVs and offer key insights for future research, emphasizing the crucial synergy between reliable long-term decision-making and the ODD as a contextual-awareness formalism.