Electrical and Electronic systems in a vehicle are increasing manifolds with Electric and ADAS Vehicles taking the lead. There is a rapid transition happening from hardware driven vehicles to software driven vehicles. ISO 26262 is a global standard defined for functional safety (FuSa) in the automotive industry which addresses the structured design and development approach for eliminating electrical malfunctions leading to critical hazards such as fire in EVs. The standard defines specific requirements that need to be met by the safety relevant electrical system and also by development processes. Though the implementation of FuSa is crucial from vehicle safety point of view, its compliance is still a challenge majorly due to lack of awareness, in-built complexities, increase in project development time and subsequent cost.
In this work, we focus on a FuSa implementation model taking into account the conventional new program development cycle. FuSa deliverables are integrated and mapped against the development lifecycle to ensure parallel activities. A strategy is defined to constitute a diversified team with the relevant stakeholders. The paper defines the flow of events and the pre-requisites which are elemental for FuSa compliance. HARA based ASIL target is assessed for meeting the requirements through a structured approach with gateway wise deliverable obedience. Digitalization is ensured by using a tool for mapping the requirements against the subsystem and subsequent test cases along with acceptance criteria. Traceability of the requirements and related deliverables are tracked and documented for the final assessment.
FuSa compliance is very much dependent upon the organization specific goals and priorities. This structured approach can assist in transforming the ‘need’ for compliance into ‘actual’ compliance overcoming the challenges and hurdles. The study also instates that on-boarding of the relevant supplier team in case of distributed development is imperative to achieve the system level FuSa compliance.