Managing Functional Safety Processes for Automotive E/E Architectures in Integrated Model-Based Development Environments

The international standard ISO 26262 for functional safety of road vehicles claims processes and requirements for the entire product lifecycle of automotive electric and electronic systems. The demanded activities and work products within the standard are highly interconnected. Additionally, references to exemplarily external quality management standards or commonly recognized industry sources are given. Therefore, the application of functional safety processes in distributed development is challenging regarding description, understanding, analysis and planning of processes. To overcome these inconveniences, we provide a meta model extension for model-based architecture description languages regarding process description, organizational structures and resource assignment. This is related to the established “Business Process Model and Notation” (BPMN) according to ISO/IEC 19510:2013. Our integration in a domain specific environment for large-scaled electric and electronic (E/E) architectures provides graphical modeling of processes. The process model artifacts can be linked to data model artifacts of the E/E architecture. Additionally, analysis and planning based on the process model is supported. As a research case study this was applied to the functional safety processes described in ISO 26262.