Can aquatic flightless birds allocate Automotive Safety requirements?

Many emerging safety standards use the concept of Safety Integrity Levels (SILs) for guiding designers on how to specify system safety requirements and then allocate these requirements to elements of the system architecture. These standards include the new automotive safety standard ISO 26262 in which SILs are called automotive SILs (or ASILs) and these will be used to illustrate the application of the techniques presented in this paper. In this paper, we propose a new approach in which the allocation of ASILs is performed by a new nature-inspired metaheuristic known as Penguins Search Optimisation Algorithm (PeSOA). PeSOA mimics the collaborative hunting strategy of penguins, using the metaphor of oxygen reserves as a search intensification operator. This allows the penguins to preserve energy, consuming it only in areas of the search space that are rich in good solutions. The performance of the approach is evaluated by applying it to a benchmark hybrid braking system case study, demonstrating performance that is an improvement to those reported in the literature.