A Functional Safety Assessment Method for Cooperative Automotive Architecture

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for assessing the functional safety of cooperative automotive architectures, addressing a gap in existing safety standards like ISO 26262 for multi-vehicle systems.

Contribution

It proposes a systematic assessment approach leveraging software architecture and safety engineering research, specifically tailored for cooperative driving scenarios.

Findings

Successfully applied to a real-world platooning prototype

Identified safety requirement fulfillment in cooperative driving architecture

Provides insights into safety assessment for multi-vehicle systems

Abstract

The scope of automotive functions has grown from a single-vehicle as an entity to multiple vehicles working together as an entity, referred to as cooperative driving. The current automotive safety standard, ISO 26262, is designed for single vehicles. With the increasing number of cooperative driving capable vehicles on the road, it is now imperative to systematically assess the functional safety of architectures of these vehicles. Many methods are proposed to assess architectures with respect to different quality attributes in the software architecture domain, but to the best of our knowledge, functional safety assessment of automotive architectures is not explored in the literature. We present a method, that leverages existing research in software architecture and safety engineering domains, to check whether the functional safety requirements for a cooperative driving scenario are fulfilled in the technical architecture of a vehicle. We apply our method on a real-life academic prototype for a cooperative driving scenario, platooning, and discuss our insights.