Functional safety of automated driving systems: Does ISO 26262 meet the challenges?

Abstract

Today’s innovative automated driving systems (ADS) functions are realised by highly interconnected and networking cyber-physical systems based on existing automated driving assistance systems (ADAS). These interconnections increase the complexity of so-called systems of systems, because automation requires information and interaction with its environment. All possible interactions must be known for the definition of the intended system behaviour in order to identify any malfunctions of ADS, which may propagate over the system boundaries and influence other systems to fail in a harmful way. Hidden links are able to affect unwanted operational system states so that they cannot be perceived as failure modes. For that reason, functional safety is an important topic for reduction of safety-critical risk to cause failures in complex automotive systems. The chapter presented discusses the application of the automotive functional safety standard ISO 26262 in context of ADS. The following main topics are highlighted: Complexity of automated driving systems, issues concerning availability and reliability, importance of the concept phase and the role of the driver. Furthermore, proposals are made on how to handle these challenges and for feasible enhancements of the current ISO 26262 standard. Existing and promising methods are discussed that deal with the increasing complexity for the development of future ADS.