The safety engineering specialist Fraunhofer IESE collaborates with Hitachi Ltd. on issues related to safety assurance in the field of autonomous driving.
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What it is all about
Fraunhofer IESE supports Hitachi in the area of safety engineering for autonomous driving systems
The challange:
Lack of safety standards, techniques, and methods for the assurance and approval of vehicles of higher automation levels
The support:
The project team develops extended multi-aspect safety engineering with tool support
The result:
The contents of future safety standards can be anticipated
Your benefits:
Fraunhofer IESE is your partner for safety engineering in autonomous driving systems
Before safety-critical systems can be released on the market, it must be guaranteed that the risk associated with them does not exceed an acceptable level. Safety standards provide appropriate specifications and represent the state of the practice in terms of assurance. However, in vehicles of higher automation levels, the established standards, techniques, and methods are not readily applicable or inadequate. Accordingly, both new and extended standards as well as new and extended safety engineering techniques and methods are required. Hitachi therefore decided to rely on the expertise of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE. The institute has competencies and project experience in the field of safety engineering for vehicles of higher automation levels. Furthermore, IESE is involved in ongoing standardization initiatives in this field.
The relevant standard for the assurance of functional safety in vehicles is ISO 26262. However, this standard was created with conventional, not with automated vehicles in mind, and is therefore not sufficient for implementing adequate safety engineering for highly automated or even autonomous vehicles. Upcoming standards such as the Safety-Of-The-Intended-Functionality (SOTIF) ISO PAS 21448 initiative attempt to close the gap between the safety engineering currently supported by safety standards and the safety engineering needed for the release of vehicles of higher automation levels. However, it is neither guaranteed that the scope of SOTIF will be sufficient to close that gap nor does a safety engineering process currently exist that includes the necessary safety considerations for vehicles of higher automation levels.
In a joint research cooperation, researchers of Hitachi and Fraunhofer IESE investigated the necessary scope for future safety engineering and how current safety standards and standard creation initiatives address this necessary scope. Based on the results of this investigation, an initial process and a methodology for multi-aspect safety engineering with tool support from our safeTbox tool was developed. The results of this project were presented at the International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability & Security (SafeComp) – one of the most important conferences in the safety engineering community – in Sweden in 2018. Sharing the results with the research community enabled critical reflection on them and contributed to building awareness for the full problem scope of safety engineering for vehicles of higher automation levels.
Dr. Shiro Yamaoka, Ph.D., Department Manager Hitachi Ltd., says:
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE