A Generic Approach to Hazard Analysis for Programmable Automotive Systems

With the increasing dependence on advanced electronic systems to control the functionality of road vehicles, the consideration of functional system safety as part of the design and implementation process for these systems is growing in importance.

An important part of such a process is to undertake a hazard analysis. Emerging standards and guidelines, such as ISO 26262 and MISRA Safety Analysis, contain a requirement to perform preliminary hazard analysis in order to identify unwanted events (typically at the vehicle level) that can result from technological causes, and to set safety requirements for the system under development to mitigate the risk associated with those events.

In this paper, a generic approach to automotive hazard analysis is described. The method is based upon a generalized model of the causal chain that leads from a low-level fault in an electronic system through to the potential for an unwanted event at the vehicle level. This model is used to derive a generic approach for hazard analysis. The paper demonstrates how an existing hazard analysis scheme, the MISRA Risk Graph for hazard classification, can be derived from the generalized model.