Integrated Safety Planning According to ISO 26262

In the automotive industry, the planning of safety activities is becoming a standard topic on the daily agenda of project centers and engineering departments. In the meantime, the entire planning and realization process of safety relevant functions is driven by the new safety standard for automotive electronics – ISO 26262. Safety planning as such is nothing new, but the question is how to achieve high planning efficiency on the one hand and conformance with the comprehensive requirements of the standard on the other hand. This paper reports on the concept of an integrated approach to plan, connect, track and evaluate defined safety activities along the safety lifecycle. The concept is based on using the original content of the standard as a reference then generating the headlines of various parts of the safety planning process. It demonstrates a way to register the required work products and to connect them to the corresponding documents, which are generated in a safety project. As a result, the stringent handling of all safety documents provides an initial input for the safety case. It allows the mapping of major events or activities of the required safety lifecycle to corresponding parts of the company’s internal product development process. And last but not least it incorporates a simple evaluation method to provide continuous information about the level of conformance with ISO 26262 process requirements.