Systematic approach furthering confirmation measures of safety critical automotive systems

Different system elements are developed independently from diverse suppliers and teams before being integrated together into safety critical automotive systems such as steering or braking systems by a manufacturer. It must be guaranteed that, despite this independent development, the achievement of the safety requirements for the overall system can be demonstrated. The necessary agreements and the integration of the necessary safety information for the overall system generate higher extra costs. In order to reduce development time and cost, systematic reuse can be a solution to engineering the required artifacts. Reassessment represents an additional source of cost. Even small modifications of a system or exchanging a component after it has been certified necessitates a reassessment. The effort required for reassessment, in many cases reaches the original effort of certification for the complete system or even exceeds it. To minimize the effort and cost of a reassessment, this paper introduces a theoretical foundation of a model-based engineering approach to reuse a safety case and change only the modified parts. This paper presents a reusability framework to support the distributed development environment together with the different composition scenarios with respect to ISO26262. A further benefit of this approach is that for development of variants in product-line, the Safety assessment process can now be easily expressed and managed