Summary: A functional safety assessment method for cooperative automotive architecture

The scope of automotive functions has grown from a single vehicle as an entity to multiple vehicles working together as an entity, referred to as cooperative driving. The current automotive safety standard, ISO 26262, is designed for single vehicles. With the increasing number of cooperative driving capable vehicles on the road, it is imperative to systematically assess their architectures’ functional safety. Many methods are proposed to assess architectures with respect to different quality attributes in the software architecture domain, but to the best of our knowledge, functional safety assessment of automotive architectures is not explored in the literature. We present a method leveraging existing software architecture and safety engineering research, to check whether the functional safety requirements for cooperative driving scenarios are fulfilled in the technical architecture of a vehicle. We apply our method on a real-life academic prototype for a scenario—platooning—and discuss our insights