02. Functional Safety Preview

Month 2 Elective: Functional Safety

Together with Elektrobit, we’ve built a fun and comprehensive Functional Safety Module.

You’ll learn functional safety frameworks to ensure that vehicles is safe, both at the system and component levels.

Functional Safety Lesson 1: Introduction

In this lesson, Elektrobit’s experts will guide you through the high-level steps that the ISO 26262 standard requires for building a functional safety case. ISO 26262 is the world-recognized standard for automotive functional safety. Understanding the requirements of this standard gets you started on mastering a crucial field of autonomous vehicle development.

Functional Safety Lesson 2: Safety Plan

In this lesson, you’ll build a safety plan for a lane-keeping assistance feature. You’ll start with the same template that Elektrobit functional safety managers use, and add the information specific to your feature.

Functional Safety Lesson 3: Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment

You’ll complete a hazard analysis and risk assessment for the lane-keeping assistance feature. As part of the HARA, you’ll brainstorm how the system might fail, including the operational mode, environmental details, and item usage of each hypothetical scenario. Your HARA will record the issues to monitor in your functional safety analysis.

Functional Safety Lesson 4: Functional Safety Concept

You’ll develop a functional safety concept that describes high-level performance requirements, addressing all issues identified from HARA.

Functional Safety Lesson 5: Technical Safety Concept

You’ll translate high-level functional safety requirements into technical safety requirements that dictate specific performance parameters. At this point you’ll have concrete constraints for the system.

Functional Safety Lesson 6: Software and Hardware

Functional safety includes specific rules on how to implement hardware and software. In this lesson, you’ll learn about spatial, temporal, and communication interference, and how to guard against them. You’ll also review MISRA C++, the most common set of rules for writing C++ for automotive systems.

Functional Safety Project: Safety Case

You’ll use the guidance from your lessons to construct work products to be part of a safety case for a lane departure warning feature. You’ll begin with the hazard analysis and risk assessment, and create further documentation for functional and technical safety concepts, and finally software and hardware requirements. Analyzing and documenting system safety is critical for autonomous vehicle development. These are skills that often only experienced automotive engineers possess!