Abstract
Keywords -Functional Safety, new automotive standard, acceptable risk, automotive safety integrity level, safety lifecycle
Based on increasing use of electronic systems for safety relevant functions in vehicles, procedures for a structured development and assessment of these systems with regard to functional safety becomes more and more important.
As in the past there is no automotive application standard for that topic, the automotive industry worldwide pushes the creation of such a new standard - ISO 26262. Basis for the development of the new standard is the generic code IEC 61508, which is valid since 1999 and has been the basis for the release of many application standards of other industry segments.
Main task of the standardisation group is to interpret the generic requirements from IEC 61508 to the practical use in automotive applications. At the beginning of standardisation work it seemed to be not very complicate to map the automotive philosophy of development to the generic requirements. More and more it turned out to be rather difficult to define acceptance criteria for Functional Safety of automotive electronic applications. On the one hand we know, that many applications are in the market without achieving hard requirements from IEC 61508 but are already accepted by the users and on the other hand there are many new innovations like driver assistance systems where current requirements for Functional Safety cannot be applied. For this reasons it became necessary to develop new techniques and methodologies to achieve an accepted safety level with an optimized effort of work. For instance it seems not to be reasonable to apply the same risk acceptance criteria for "comfort functions" than for "dynamic driving functions".
The existing working drafts of ISO 26262 document the first results of effective activities in the standardisation group. TÜV SÜD as one of the initiators demonstrates the actual state of affairs and the following consequences being relevant for the whole automotive industry