Evaluating Alternate Approaches for Co-Hosting Third Party Software within Safety Critical Applications in ISO 26262 Context

Safety compliance has a new set of difficult questions to address due to the usage of COTS, OSS and externally supplied software code in automotive systems. The use of third-party software component is essential to business as it helps in reduction of cost and development cycle. However, there are many technical risks encountered when incorporating Third-Party Software (TPSW) components into safety related software. Moreover, safety systems conforming to new automotive safety standard ISO 26262 are expected to satisfy criteria for co-existence of TPSW with internal safety related software and legacy code. The purpose is to avoid a potential failure that may be triggered by TPSW which in turn may propagate to cause failure in other software partitions. There are several options available to address the above requirements. We should carefully evaluate the TPSW's functionality and pedigree and apply combination of techniques to assist in supporting the intent of ISO 26262. This paper discusses on the issues concerning insertion of third party software code (OEM supplied code, Tier 2 vendor software) into in-house developed ECU software. Multiple approaches have been evaluated and discussed to address integration related issues and ISO 26262 compliance.