CARTRONIC® Based Safety Analysis: Introducing Safety Aspects In Early Development Phases

This article gives an overview of the CARTRONIC^® based safety analysis (CSA) including an approach for the automatic determination of failure dependencies in automotive systems. CSA is a safety analysis in an early stage of product development. The goals are to identify safety critical components as soon as practicable in the product development process and to automate the analysis as far as possible. This implies that the system view is abstract, i.e. independent of a certain realization just regarding system functionality.

In the CSA so called global failure effects will be systematically identified and assessed regarding severity of potential injuries. Global failure effects are especially important because they reveal failures within the system to the outside world (see also definition 3.1). Additionally the CSA keeps track of failure dependencies and supports the integration of safety measures in the system structure. The analysis of a system structure for the determination of failure dependencies can be automated using MAX-PLUS algebra.

The result of the CARTRONIC^® based safety analysis is also valuable information to a System-FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, e.g. [Misra 1992], [Deckers et al. 1994]) later in a development process.

The approach summarized above is explained using a simplified example.