Toward a Consistent Taxonomy for Scenario-Based Development and Test Approaches for Automated Vehicles: A Proposal for a Structuring Framework, a Basic Vocabulary, and Its Application

Ensuring and validating the safe operation of automated vehicles are key challenges for their market launch. Scenario-based development and test approaches are currently being pursued as possible solutions. An essential prerequisite for researching, applying, and standardizing these approaches is a consistent and agreed-upon taxonomy. This taxonomy must include relevant terms, their descriptions, and the relationships between the respective terms. To the best of our knowledge, such a taxonomy does not yet exist, and this absence often leads to misunderstandings in, for example, coordination processes and discussions. This publication contributes to this taxonomy. For this purpose, we propose a framework for structuring the taxonomy. Within this framework, we propose a basic vocabulary by identifying and describing terms that we consider particularly relevant to an overview of such scenario-based development and test approaches. Additionally, we visualize the proposed terms and the relationships between them as UML diagrams and explain the application of the proposed basic vocabulary using an example.