Having Your Cake and Eating It: A Model-Based Approach for Satisfying ISO26262 Software Development Requirements

The adoption of model-based development in the automotive industry has been driven by the need to respond to the challenges of producing software for high-volume applications: increasingly complex feature sets; shorter deadlines and low residual failure rates to minimize recalls.

Empirical evidence suggests that model-based development does not adversely affect safety - passenger fatalities due to software failure are significantly lower than for any other root cause of death [3]. Good in-field results however, are no reason to be complacent because we need to establish that a system is safe before it enters service. The imminent arrival of ISO26262 provides a good opportunity to consider how the requirements for software in safety-related systems can be addressed by a model-based development approach.

This paper considers how such an approach can support the requirements of an ISO26262-based development process. Particular attention is given to how the combination of error prevention and detection mechanisms in the modeling language can be used to support the system safety case.