Cooperative Automated Driving for managing Transition Areas and the Operational Design Domain (ODD)

Kurzfassung

When cooperative automated vehicles (CAVs) emerge on urban roads, there will be areas and situations where all levels of automation can be granted, and others where highly automated driving will not be allowed or is not feasible. Complex environments or temporary road configurations are examples of situations leading to takeover requests and are referred to as 'Transition Areas'. Such situations are assumed to cause negative impacts on traffic safety and efficiency, in particular with mixed traffic fleets. The TransAID project is developing a digital infrastructure and dedicated traffic management strategies to assist CAVs at transition areas, and preserve safe and smooth traffic flow. This paper explains the relevance of transition areas and the link to the operational design domain (ODD) of automated vehicles. By combining results from different projects with findings from stakeholder consultation workshops, ODD is discussed in detail and a conceptual structure to guide the discussion is provided.