Navigating the landscape of operational design domains: A comprehensive mapping study

In recent years, standards and laws have introduced the operational design domain (ODD) as a fundamental artifact for assuring the safety of automated driving systems (ADS). Despite various studies about ODDs, there are still many open challenges and not many established methods. This leads to the problem of safety engineers not knowing how to create high-quality ODD descriptions or embed ODD activities in their processes. We want to address this lack of guidance in this article with a mapping study to provide an overview of the research landscape of ODD. We further identify open research challenges based on the industry’s demands. Therefore, we review standards and industry reports to identify the requirements and needs for the ODD in the industry context. We then map methods from research to these requirements to open challenges. Different solutions are harmonized to provide an overview of how a certain challenge can be addressed. The reviewed literature is further clustered and aligned with the V-model so that engineers can locate ODD-related activities and integrate them into their processes. Based on the literature review, we identify different requirements for the ODD based on the engineering use cases. Due to the major differences in requirements of these use cases, we conclude that one ODD description is insufficient to support them all. Further, we see a need for ODD change management and a lack of methods to address this issue. As a major safety artifact, we identified further potential in systematic knowledge-based methods for defining an ODD.