State of the Art Study of the Safety Argumentation Frameworks for Automated Driving System Safety

TL;DR

This paper reviews current safety argumentation frameworks for automated driving systems, emphasizing the need for harmonized global safety assurance methods amid diverse regulatory and technical approaches.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of existing safety validation methods, highlighting the lack of consensus and proposing a need for standardized, scenario-based safety argumentation frameworks.

Findings

No single safety methodology is universally accepted.

Existing frameworks are diverse and lack standardization.

A harmonized safety assurance scheme is needed.

Abstract

The automotive industry is experiencing a transition from assisted to highly automated driving. New concepts for validation of Automated Driving System (ADS) include amongst other a shift from a "technology based" approach to a "scenario based" assessment. The safety validation and type approval process of ADS are seen as the biggest challenges for the automotive industry today. Having in mind a variety of existing white papers, standardization activities and regulatory approaches, manufactures still struggle with selecting the best practices that keep aligned with their Safety Management System and Safety Culture. A step forward would be to implement a harmonized global safety assurance scheme that is compliant with relevant regulations, laws, standards, and reflects local rules. Today many communities (regulatory bodies, local authorities, industrial stake-holders) work on proof-of-concept framework for the Safety Argumentation as an answer to this problem. Unfortunately, there is still no consensus on one definitive methodology and a set of safety metrics to measure ADS safety. An objective of this summary report is to facilitate a comprehensive review and analysis of the literature concerning available methods and approaches for vehicle safety, engineering frameworks, processes of scenario-based evaluation and a vendor- and technology-neutral Safety Argumentation approaches and tools.