Collect feedback to the definition of a concrete scenario

I like to share my proposal for the definition of what a concrete scenario is with you (I did this proposal as part of the review of a feature request from the Usage & Pragmatics group some weeks ago).

Here it is:

Concrete Scenario:

A formal scenario that provides any information that is needed to

• unambiguously determine the initial state s_0 of each entity involved in the scenario, and

• enable a simulation engine to determine each successor state s_i with i > 0 and thus to determine the exact evolution of any scenario parameters and variables for any point in time until the execution ends.

This may be either given by specifying concrete locations and trajectories, or by referencing deterministic models (driver, traffic, weather, vehicle dynamics, …​) that determine the evolution of values during scenario execution (or a mixture of both). This refers to all variables which may influence how the system behaves and how its resulting behavior will be measured.

Note: This definition is intentionally kept generic to be independent of concrete simulators and models. This is because I am convinced that in the end the question whether a scenario is concrete (or executable) depends on the simulator and models that should be used for execution i.e. the same scenario might be executable for one simulator using certain models but not for another simulator using other models e.g. because some models might have different input parameters than others. And I would be really interested if you agree to this and whether we are able to create concrete examples for that.

Please feel free to comment or propose changes to this proposal to discuss them.

It would be also interesting if you could create an instance of this definition for your own simulator. Then we could compare different instances and see whether and how they differ.