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Advanced functionalities unthinkable a few decades ago are now being introduced into automotive vehicles through embedded systems for reasons like emission control, vehicle connectivity, safety and cooperative behaviors. As the development often involves stakeholders from different engineering disciplines and organizations, the complexity due to shared requirements, interdependencies of data, functions, and resources, as well as tight constraints in regards to timing, safety, and resource efficiency makes the system integration, quality control and assurance, reuse and change management increasingly more difficult. This calls for a more rigorous approach to the development of automotive embedded systems and components.

Today's automobiles contain a lot of electrical and electronic (E/E) systems with safety-related functionality. In a design-process compliant to the industrial standard ISO 26262 unknown dependencies between events and elements are risks that potentially violate safety requirements or safety goals. Therefore, the identification and analysis of dependent failures is important. Physical environment influences like temperature are one class of factors which can lead to coupling effects and cause dependent failures. In this paper we show a novel contract-based approach to deal with geometric installations of elements in an automobile. It avoids violations of safety requirements by identification and prevention of dependent failures resulting from coupling effects between elements. The influences of an element on environment factors and the failure effects of such environment factors on elements are explicitly specified as physical conditions.