Structuring Safety Requirements in ISO 26262 Using Contract Theory

ISO 26262 ”Road vehicles-Functional Safety” is a standard for the automotive industry, administered in an attempt to prevent potential accidents due to systematic and random failures in the Electrical/Electronic-system. ISO 26262 is based on the principle of relying on safety requirements as the main source of information to enforce correctness of design. We show that the contract theory from the SPEEDS FP6 project provides a suitable foundation to structure safety requirements in ISO 26262. Contracts provide the necessary support to separate the responsibilities between a system and its environment by explicitly imposing requirements on the environment as assumptions, in order to guarantee the safety requirements. We show this by characterizing two levels of safety requirements with contracts for an industrial system where we also show how contract theory supports the verification of consistency and completeness of safety requirements.