Multi-aspect Safety Engineering for Highly Automated Driving: Looking Beyond Functional Safety and Established Standards and Methodologies

Highly automated and autonomous driving is a major trend and vast amounts of effort and resources are presently being invested in the development of corresponding solutions. However, safety assurance is a concern, as established safety engineering standards and methodologies are not sufficient in this context. In this paper, we elaborate the fundamental safety engineering steps that are necessary to create safe vehicles of higher automation levels. Furthermore, we map these steps to the guidance presently available in existing (e.g., ISO26262) and upcoming (e.g., ISO PAS 21448) standards and point out open gaps. We then outline an approach for overcoming the identified deficiencies by integrating three different safety engineering disciplines. This includes (1) creating a safe nominal behavior specification; (2) dealing with functional insufficiencies, and (3) assuring the related performance wrt. functional safety. We exemplify our proposed methodology with a case study from industry