Search Results

Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) show great potential to improve our transport systems. Safety validation, before market launch, is challenging due to the large number of miles required to gather enough evidence for a proven in use argumentation. Hence there is ongoing research to find more effective ways of verifying and validating the safety of ADSs. It is crucial both for the design as well as the validation to have a good understanding of the environment of the ADS. A natural way of characterizing the external conditions is by modelling and analysing data from real traffic. Towards this end, we present a framework with the primary ultimate objective to completely model and quantify the statistically relevant actions that other vehicles conduct on motorways. Two categories of fundamental actions are identified by recognising that a vehicle can only move longitudinally and laterally.

With the advent of ISO 26262 there is an increased emphasis on top-down design in the automotive industry. While the standard delivers a best practice framework and a reference safety lifecycle, it lacks detailed requirements for its various constituent phases. The lack of guidance becomes especially evident for the reuse of legacy components and subsystems, the most common scenario in the cost-sensitive automotive domain, leaving vehicle architects and safety engineers to rely on experience without methodological support for their decisions. This poses particular challenges in the industry which is currently undergoing many significant changes due to new features like connectivity, servitization, electrification and automation. In this paper we focus on automated driving where multiple subsystems, both new and legacy, need to coordinate to realize a safety-critical function.

The use of innovative power sources in future cars has long-ranging implications on vehicle safety. We studied these implications in the context of the guidance on software tool qualification in the then current ISO 26262 draft, when building an urban concept vehicle to participate in the 2011 Shell Eco-Marathon. While the guidance on tool qualification is detailed, the guidance in regard to tools integrated into tool chains is limited. It only points out that the environment that tools execute in needs to be taken into consideration. In this paper we clarify the implications of tool chains on tool qualification in the context of ISO 26262 by focusing on answering two questions; first, are there parts of the development environment related to tool integration that are likely to fall outside of tool qualification efforts as currently defined by ISO 26262; secondly, can we define if, and -if so- how, tool integration is affected by ensuring functional safety.

Automated Driving is revolutionizing many of the traditional ways of operation in the automotive industry. The impact on safety engineering of automotive functions is arguably one of the most important changes. There has been a need to re-think the impact of the partial or complete absence of the human driver (in terms of a supervisory entity) in not only newly developed functions but also in the qualification of the use of legacy functions in new contexts. The scope of the variety of scenarios that a vehicle may encounter even within a constrained Operational Design Domain, and the highly dynamic nature of Automated Driving, mean that new methods such as simulation can greatly aid the process of safety engineering.

Heavy commercial vehicles constitute the dominant form of inland freight transport. There is a strong interest in making such vehicles autonomous (self-driving), in order to improve safety and the economics of fleet operation. Autonomy concerns affect a number of key systems within the vehicle. One such key system is brakes, which need to remain continuously available throughout vehicle operation. This paper presents a fail-operational functional brake architecture for autonomous heavy commercial vehicles. The architecture is based on a reconfiguration of the existing brake systems in a typical vehicle, in order to attain dynamic, diversified redundancy along with desired brake performance. Specifically, the parking brake is modified to act as a secondary brake with capabilities for monitoring and intervention of the primary brake system.