What is Automotive Functional Safety? Does your organization need ISO 26262 expertise?

December 12, 2022

As businesses use standardized processes for product development and testing, safety practices are becoming more regulated. The automobile industry is no exception to that. An international standard for the automotive industry that focuses on safety-critical components is needed, and ISO 26262 fills that need. ISO 26262 is a subset of IEC 61508, which is a generic functional safety standard for electrical and electronic (E/E) systems.

ISO 26262 employs a step-by-step approach to managing functional safety and regulating product development at the system, hardware, and software levels.

The ISO 26262 standard specifies rules and guidelines for the entire product development process, from concept to decommissioning. It explains how to assign a system or component an acceptable risk level and document the overall testing process.

The ISO 26262 Automotive Industry Safety Standard: Why is it important?

When evaluating the safety of the vehicle’s electrical and electronic components, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers for the automotive industry benefit in a number of ways from using ISO 26262.

• Shows diligence and ensure that the corresponding vehicle and/or the corresponding systems are overall safe in accordance with ISO 26262
• By correctly interpreting and putting into practice the ISO 26262 requirements, competitive advantage can be maintained.
• Reduces the possibility of the product being rejected by the market and the probability of it harming the user.
• Prevents expensive product recalls and reputational harm brought on by safety risks because of inadequate safety assurance
• Facilitates access to international markets by ensuring adherence to pertinent international laws
• Outlines the lifecycle of automotive safety (management, development, production, operation, service, and decommissioning) and supports customizing the required activities throughout these phases.
• Offers a risk-based methodology tailored specifically for the automotive industry (Automotive Safety Integrity Levels, ASILs) for classifying risks.
• Specifies the item’s essential safety requirements using ASILs to achieve an acceptable residual risk and conditions that must be met for verification and validation procedures in order to guarantee that a sufficient and acceptable level of safety is achieved.

How ISO 26262 works:

• Establishes a vocabulary, making sure to differentiate between terms like “fault,” “error,” and “failure”
• Standards for the safety lifecycle of specific automotive products are established.
  • Conceptual stage
  • System-level, hardware-level, and software-level product development
  • Operations and production
  • Serving and shutting down
• Offers a risk-based method for determining risk classes (ASILs) that is specific to the automotive industry.
  • Determines and evaluates safety risks
  • Establishes standards to bring those risks down to manageable levels
  • Follows specifications to guarantee that the delivered product achieves an acceptable level of safety

ISO 26262- Benefits:

The ISO 26262 standard guarantees that all car parts are created with a high level of safety in mind. It offers recommendations for every stage of the automotive safety lifecycle, from overall risk management to the development, production, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning of specific components. OEMs can inspect their supply chain using ISO 26262 and make sure that E/E safety hazards don’t surface later in the production process, when problems are much more expensive to fix.

Vendors increasingly attempt to reduce development time for automotive electronic systems by designing hardware and software simultaneously, and ISO 26262 takes this into account. In order to achieve the highest levels of safety, the ISO 26262 Committee noted that extensive guidelines for concurrent hardware and software development and testing must be followed.

ASIL and ISO 26262

The Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), which is used to evaluate the risk associated with a specific system component, is a significant component of ISO 26262. The risk of random hardware failures and systematic failures increases with system complexity.

A-D represents the four Automotive Safety Integrity Level values. ASIL A is the lowest level of risk, and ASIL D is the highest; as you progress from A to D, the compliance requirements become more stringent.

There is a fifth option for determining Automotive Safety Integrity Levels, called QM (quality management). This is used to indicate that the component in question is exempt from safety requirements. (However, in most cases, doing so will improve the quality of the final product.)

How MulticoreWare can help you meet ISO 26262 compliance

Compliance with the safety standard is essential whether you’re developing real automotive components like integrated circuits or virtual ones like automotive hypervisors. And it’s crucial to uphold compliance throughout the entire lifecycle of creating embedded software for automotive applications.

However, it can be difficult for development teams to follow the rules. Complexity of systems and codebases rises. This makes software validation and verification difficult as well. MulticoreWare can assist with the steps necessary to meet ISO 26262 compliance.

MulticoreWare has supported various automotive customers (OEM, Tier-1 & Tier-2) on different engagement models of the ISO 26262 development process. We can collaboratively work on Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), derive ASIL A/B/C/D ratings with safety goals, and prescribe safety mechanisms for the item(s) under consideration.

The safety guidance can be extended to product development and testing at the system, hardware, and software levels. By validating the use assumptions, we assist Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) products, ASIL capable/compliant commercially available off-the-shelf products to be integrated into the E/E systems.

Write to us : info@multicorewareinc.com