An Approach for Structuring a Highly Automated Driving Multiple Channel Vehicle System for Safety Analysis

Introducing highly automated driving requires to overcome many challenges. Regarding functional safety, the shift from a fail-safe to a fail-operational vehicle control system is necessary to resume the driving task even in the case of a failure. This necessitates a completely new, multi-channel vehicle architecture including enhanced methods for safety analysis and the collating of single analyses on the system level. We introduce an approach based on a system level fault-tree analysis to ensure completeness of the safety analysis and to deduce suitable methods for detailed analysis of each type of fault, such as random hardware or systematic faults, correlating with branches of the fault-tree. Furthermore, we identify components with the necessity of absence of common cause failures.