A process to support a systematic change impact analysis of variability and safety in automotive functions

Mostly all innovative driving functions are realized by software and many of them are safety-related. This leads to an increasing complexity when analyzing, in respect to ISO 26262, the dependencies between functions in general as well as the functional or technical variance in particular. Major challenges arise while developing innovative automotive functions: (1) The increasing variety of development artifacts, (2) inconsistencies due to the integration of different models and data, (3) a high effort concerning traceability between various artifacts, and (4) finally the management of changes in these artifacts as well as the extensive reuse thereof. In this paper we propose a process for a model-based change impact analysis, which is already integrating well established engineering disciplines: model-based development, software product line engineering (SPLE) and safety engineering. With respect to change requests, a holistic handling of variants in a software product line (SPL) and its corresponding variability including safety artifacts are necessary to ensure an efficient development which complies with the automotive safety standard ISO 26262. In particular, we describe engineering tasks and preconditions to achieve a process to support an integrated change impact analysis. The assessment of the change impact is essential for a systematic reuse of safety-related engineering artifacts for different product variants. Thus, we achieve both, a decrease of development costs and an increase in quality of safety-critical innovative functions.