Reduction of Solution Space in the Automotive Safety Integrity Levels Allocation Problem

Abstract

Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASILs) are a key concept of ISO 26262, the new automotive functional safety, tasked with ensuring that new automotive systems provide the required safety. This is largely accomplished by allocating safety requirements as ASILs to components that may cause the failure of critical functionalities. Assigning appropriate ASILs to components is a major design issue, and due to the combinatorial nature of the problem, a huge number of solutions is available in the search space. However, searching though this space may become impracticable in large and complex systems and, therefore, research efforts to develop techniques that find optimal ASIL allocations in reasonable time are ongoing. In this paper, we introduce a couple of strategies to reduce the solution space. These strategies have been applied on different cases studies where we demonstrate their efficacy in reducing the solution space.