Assurance of Automotive Safety - A Safety Case Approach

A safety case should provide a clear, comprehensible and defensible argument, supported by evidence, that a system is acceptably safe to operate in a particular environment. This approach is not new. For example, in the nuclear industry, safety cases are approaching their 50 birthday. In stark contrast, the automotive industry has never been required to produce a safety case. Instead, it has relied on compliance with extensive regional and national regulation. With the imminent introduction of the automotive safety standard ISO 26262, the production of a safety case is now explicitly required by the standard for electrical and electronic systems. This presents both opportunities and challenges to safety practitioners and researchers within that industry. This paper sets out to look at the issues of what a safety case might look like for a complete vehicle and how the ISO 26262 fits into the existing framework of automotive safety. Using the ideas of modular safety case construction, this approach is developed into a number of reusable safety arguments to form an automotive safety case pattern catalogue. Evaluation of the approach is carried out through an industrial case study.