Functional Safety of Automotive Software

Abstract

In the previous chapters we explored generic methods for assessing quality of software architecture and software design. In this chapter we continue with a much-related topic, functional safety of software, in which functional safety assessment is one of the last activities during product development. We describe how the automotive industry works with functional safety. Much of this work is based on the ISO 26262 standard that was published in 2011. This version of the standard is applicable for passenger cars up to 3500 kg. There is also ongoing work on a future version, expected in 2018, applicable to most road vehicles, including buses, motorcycles, and trucks. The scope of the ISO 26262 standard is more than software development and for better understanding we give an overview of these other development phases in this chapter. However, we focus on software development according to ISO 26262. The different phases that are covered are software planning, software safety requirements, software architectural design, software unit design and implementation, software integration and testing, and verification of software.