On the Impact of Early Design Decisions on Quality Attributes of Automated Driving Systems

Abstract

Initiatives such as smart mobility and automated driving bring new concerns such as safety and security for the automotive industry. New architecture and designs are required for the in-vehicle systems to address these emerging concerns. Early design decisions have a large impact on the required functionalities as well as the quality attributes of these systems. Understanding the impact of design decisions on the system quality is crucial for successful system development. It is difficult to estimate the requirements for safety (at an early development stage) considering the innovation aspect of automated driving. These safety requirements have a considerable influence on project planning and development cost. Therefore, it is important for the industry to understand the decision points and their impact on system design. In this article, we share our experience on understanding the impact of early design decisions on safety requirements. We particularly discuss the impact of design decisions regarding the operational design domain on (functional) safety. We provide two automated driving systems as discussion cases and investigate the impact of the operational situation on the safety requirements such as safe state and degraded operating mode. We show how posting small constraints on the operational situation can result in simplification of the sensor and actuator requirements of these systems.