Vehicle Safety, Functional Safety, OBD Diagnosis

With a significantly increasing number of electrical and electronic systems within road vehicles, the complexity of such systems dramatically increases. To prevent these increasingly complex systems from becoming more and more fault-prone is one of the most important challenges of the future. Systems have to be intrinsically safe whereby owing to the cost pressure within the automotive industry, it is not possible just to double or triple the systems, as it is usual in the avionics industry. This chapter describes the general concept of vehicle safety—especially with regard to functional safety that came into focus within recent years with the advent of a new standard for functional safety of road vehicles—the ISO 26262. This chapter gives an overview over the trends why safety of road vehicles becomes more and more important in future, what are the special constraints of the automotive industry. Furthermore, we explain the legal point of view and the key concept of ISO 26262, for example, the method of hazard analysis and risk assessment, the concept of SEooC (safety element out of context), the confidence in the use of software tools, and the random hardware faults and hardware metrics. Some side issues of vehicle safety such as the quality assurance concept and the OBD (on-board diagnosis) are described. Keywords: road vehicles; safety; functional safety; ISO 26262; automotive safety integrity level; ASIL ; product liability; qualification of software tools; quality assurance; diagnosis