Although the ISO 26262 provides requirements and recommendations for an automotive functional safety lifecycle, practical guidance on how to handle these safety activities and safety artifacts is still lacking.
This paper provides an overview of a semi-formal safety engineering approach based on SysML for specifying the relevant safety artifacts in the concept phase. Using specific diagram types, different views of the available data can be provided that reflects the specific needs of the stakeholders involved. One objective of this work is to improve the common understanding of the relevant safety aspects during the system design.
The approach, which is demonstrated here from the perspective of a Tier1 supplier for an automotive battery system, covers different breakdown levels of a vehicle.
The safety workflow presented here supports engineers' efforts to meet the safety standard ISO 26262 in a systematic way. Furthermore, it offers a solution to deal with the interaction of safety artifacts and the safety analysis activities, which allows for the creation of a compelling safety argument in the concept phase.