A Systematic Approach Based on STPA for Developing a Dependable Architecture for Fully Automated Driving Vehicles

Fully automated driving:. vehicles represent a major innovation in the automotive industry which will replace driver tasks by software functions to make traffic more comfortable. Ensuring the operational safety of the fully automated vehicles is a big challenge. The operational safety is affected by different dependability attributes such as availability, reliability, and security. However, demands on fully automated driving vehicles, like a fail operational and nominative performance, are not covered by the current automotive safety standards like ISO 26262. These standards were not established for fully automated driving vehicles. STPA (Systems-Theoretic Processes Analysis) is a safety analysis approach designed for evaluating the safety of complex systems. STPA has not been used, however, to evaluate the complex architecture design of fully automated driving vehicles. For this purpose, we propose a systematic approach based on STPA to consider the operational safety of the fully automated driving architecture regarding different aspects at an early stage. The approach aims at providing design recommendations to the engineers for the definition of the fully automated driving vehicle architecture. The application of the proposed approach is illustrated by a current project of a fully automated driving system at Continental. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.