Assessing the Adherence of an Industrial Autonomous Driving Framework to ISO 26262 Software Guidelines

The complexity and size of Autonomous Driving (AD) software are comparably higher than that of software implementing other (standard) functionalities in the car. To make things worse, a big fraction of AD software is not specifically designed for the automotive (or any other critical) domain, but the mainstream market. This brings uncertainty on to which extent AD software adheres to guidelines in safety standards. In this paper, we present our experience in applying ISO 26262 - the applicable functional safety standard for road vehicles - software safety guidelines to industrial AD software, in particular, Apollo, a heterogeneous Autonomous Driving framework used extensively in industry. We provide quantitative and qualitative metrics of compliance for many ISO 26262 recommendations on software design, implementation, and testing.