An Automatic Approach to Perform FMEDA Safety Assessment on Hardware Designs

Electronic control units have a central role in almost all the function of road vehicles. Some of these functions are safety critical so, during their development, it is requested by standards, like ISO 26262, to follow strict design rules and to perform in-depth verification steps. One of the technique recommended during the hardware design process is the failure mode, effect and diagnostic analysis (FMEDA). In industrial practice, this technique is manually applied by the designer by inspecting the circuit schematics, but in this way, the process is error-prone and make it difficult to take in proper consideration the contribution of the embedded software. In literature, it is possible to find some attempts to automate the FMEDA process. This article discusses a novel approach that allows reducing the time needed to perform FMEA and improving the quality of the achieved results.