A Process-Oriented Approach for Functional Safety Implementation in the Automotive Industry

Abstract

Functional safety had already attracted the attention of the automotive industry, becoming a key issue of electronic control units (ECUs) installed in road vehicles. OEMs and suppliers had initially invested in improvement models, such as SPICE and CMMI, to raise the maturity of their development processes and to ensure a standardized and measurable approach to the design, test and release of ECUs. Next, they had moved to apply draft versions of ISO 26262 as to be up to date with the state-of-the-art in automobiles functional safety. The 15th November 2011, the approved version of ISO 26262 was finally released and now the automotive industry has to gather the challenge of quickly integrating its Automotive SPICE compliant processes and the new functional safety standard. This paper describes a pragmatic Methodology to cope with ISO 26262 based in its integration with Automotive SPICE, in order to optimize costs and time by reusing current processes.