Supplemental FMEA for Monitoring and System Response of Electronic Power Steering Control System Functional Safety

Today’s vehicles provide a wide range of functions. Some offer comfort support for driving scenarios and others offer a higher level of safety to the driver. Increasing complex systems drives the need for reliable engineering to avoid or at least detect and mitigate malfunctions which would lead to any person being injured. Following state of the art for definition, design, and implementation of any system must therefore always be the target. The need to meet stringent safety requirements of the ISO 26262 Standard is presenting new challenges. In particular, the solutions must ensure that automotive electronic systems always operate safely throughout the vehicle life cycle. Functional safety relies on the safety mechanisms within the design that monitor and verify the correct functional operation of the design while the system is in use. The ability of these safety mechanisms to cover the potential faults determines the overall diagnostic coverage of the design. As a solution that addresses these challenges, in this paper a concept is presented for Supplemental failure mode effect analysis for Monitoring System Response (FMEA-MSR) where the potential failure causes under customer operating conditions are analyzed with respect to the technical effects on the system, vehicle, people and regulatory compliance. FMEA-MSR assesses the risk reduction by monitoring and evaluating the system response and contributes to the provision of evidence of the ability of the diagnostic, logical and actuation mechanisms to achieve and maintain compliant state.