ISO/PAS 27145 is intended to become the single communication standard for access to OBD-related information. To allow for a smooth migration from the existing communication standards to this future world-wide standardized communication standard, the initial communication concept will be based on CAN. In a second step, ISO/PAS 27145 will be extended to define the world-wide harmonized OBD communication standard based on existing industry communications standards (e.g. Internet Protocol) over Ethernet. Due to the usage of standard network layer protocols, future extensions to optional physical layers (e.g. wireless) are possible.

ISO/PAS 27145:2006 gives an overview of the structure and the partitioning of the different parts of ISO/PAS 27145, and shows the relation between the parts. In addition, it outlines the use case scenarios where the ISO/PAS 27145 document set will be used. All terminology that is common throughout the ISO/PAS 27145 document set is also outlined here.