An architecture pattern for safety critical automated driving applications: design and analysis

Introduction of automated driving increases complexity of automotive systems. As a result, architecture design becomes a major concern for ensuring non-functional requirements such as safety, and modifiability. In the ISO 26262 standard, architecture patterns are recommended for system development. However, the existing architecture patterns may not be able to answer requirements of automated driving completely. When applying these patterns in the automated driving context, modification and analysis of these patterns are needed. In this paper, we present a novel architecture pattern for safety critical automated driving functions. In addition, we propose a generic approach to compare our pattern with a number of existing ones. The comparison results can be used as a basis for project specific architectural decisions. Our Safety Channel pattern is validated by its implementation for a real-life truck platooning application