Operational Design Domain for Cars versus Operational Envelope for Ships: Handling Human Capabilities and Fallbacks

Autonomous cars have been researched since the 1980s and has created significant interest in both the research and commercial communities. Terminology is in the process of being standardized and the concept of the operational design domain has been proposed to define the capabilities of the car's driving automation system. Autonomous and unmanned ships have similarly been a research item, also since the 1980s, but with a much lower public profile. A main difference between the two types of vehicles is that autonomous ships in most cases will have human supervision and backup control responsibilities. This has led us to suggest the term operational envelope for the ship, instead of operational design domain, and to include the human capabilities in the operational envelope. This paper describes these concepts and the benefits of the operational envelope when dealing with ships.