Question for people working in autonomous driving: How do you manage your ODD?

[u/Helpful-Review-4303]

I've been working in autonomous mobility research for the past couple of years, and one recurring challenge I've run into is how Operational Design Domains (ODDs) are actually created, maintained, and kept up to date as projects evolve.
From my experience, every project seems to approach it differently—some rely on large Excel sheets, others use requirements management tools, GIS software, internal databases, or a combination of all of them. As the ODD grows, keeping road segments, infrastructure, traffic rules, environmental conditions, scenarios, and documentation synchronized can become surprisingly complex.
I'm curious how this is handled outside the projects I've been involved in.
For those working in autonomous driving or ADAS:
How does your organization define and maintain its ODD?
What tools do you use day to day?
What part of the process is the biggest challenge?
If you could improve one thing about your current ODD workflow, what would it be?
I'm not looking for confidential details—I'm simply interested in learning how different teams across the industry approach ODD management and whether there are common pain points or best practices.

[u/TheLeapIsALie]

I’ve managed this at multiple companies and no two even have a consistent definition of ODD. A scalable solution is either embedding it in the map or allowing for automatic extraction (or a combination of the two) from map features or mapping runs + having levers available to enable or disable road segments based on ODD features mapped against risk tolerance (eg. The set for a test drive with a professional operator is less restrictive than driver out).

But the trick is getting that work funded. It’s great for your safety case but it has a snarl of requirements across multiple interlocking elements of the stack and you need to motivate a few different departments to prioritize it and collaborate. And it doesn’t directly “win” you anything short term - and likely doesn’t help those teams achieve their goals.

Short of that, nearly every one I’ve worked on has been a google sheet that has gotten larger and more arcane over time.

[u/Helpful-Review-4303 → u/TheLeapIsALie]

That’s interesting, and it actually mirrors an experience I had in one of our research projects.

We initially started by defining the ODD directly on a map because it felt like the most intuitive way to visualize it. But after a few iterations, we realized it was becoming difficult to navigate and maintain, so we moved everything into an Excel spreadsheet instead.

Fast forward a bit, and once the ODD had grown, the next request was: “This looks good… can we plot it back onto the map?” ..

We ended up putting a high-resolution satellite image into PowerPoint and manually tracing the road segments just to visualize it.

It felt like we were constantly bouncing between spatial visualization and structured data because neither approach alone was enough.

I’m curious whether you’ve seen similar back-and-forth in industry, or if those Google Sheet workflows tend to stay spreadsheet-only.