Defining and Substantiating the Terms Scene, Situation, and Scenario for Automated Driving

For the design and test of functional modules of an automated vehicle, it is essential to define interfaces. While interfaces on the perception side, like object lists, point clouds or occupancy grids, are to a certain degree settled already, they are quite vague in the consecutive steps of context modeling and in particular on the side of driving execution. The authors consider the scene as the central interface between perception and behavior planning & control. Within the behavior planning & control block, a situation is a central data container. A scenario is a common approach to substantiate test cases for functional modules and can be used to detail the functional description of a system. However, definitions of these terms are often-at best- vague or even contradictory. This paper will review these definitions and come up with a consistent definition for each term. Moreover, we present an example for the implementation of each of these interfaces.