ISO 15031-5:2011 is intended to satisfy the data reporting requirements of On-Board Diagnostic (OBD) regulations in the United States and Europe, and any other region that may adopt similar requirements in the future. ISO 15031-5:2011 specifies:

- message formats for request and response messages,

- timing requirements between request messages from external test equipment and response messages from vehicles, and between those messages and subsequent request messages,

- behaviour of both the vehicle and external test equipment if data is not available,

- a set of diagnostic services, with corresponding content of request and response messages, to satisfy OBD regulations.

ISO 15031-5:2011 includes capabilities required to satisfy OBD requirements for multiple regions, model years, engine types, and vehicle types. Those regulations are not yet final for some regions, and are expected to change in the future. ISO 15031-5:2011 makes no attempt to interpret the regulations and does not include applicability of the included diagnostic services and data parameters for various vehicle applications. The user of ISO 15031-5:2011 is responsible for verifying the applicability of each clause of ISO 15031-5:2011 for a specific vehicle, engine, model year and region.

ISO 15031-5:2011 specifies diagnostic services and functionally addressed request/response messages required to be supported by motor vehicles and external test equipment for diagnostic purposes which pertain to motor vehicle emission-related data. Any external test equipment meeting the requirements of ISO 15031-4 use these messages to retrieve emissions-related information from the vehicle.

Each clause in ISO 15031-5:2011 which specifies additional details to existing sections of ISO 9141-2, ISO 14230-4, SAE J1850, and ISO 15765-4 supersede those specifications.

ISO 15031-5:2011 references SAE J1979-DA (Digital Annex), which includes all definitions of PIDs, OBDMIDs, TIDs and INFOTYPES.

ISO 15031-5:2011 provides the mechanism to satisfy the requirements included in the country-specific regulations and not all capabilities included in ISO 15031-5:2011 are required by the country-specific regulations. ISO 15031-5:2011 is not considered a final authority for interpretation of the regulations. Therefore readers should determine the applicability of capabilities defined in ISO 15031-5:2011 for their own specific needs.