Historical Risk Mitigation in Commercial Aircraft Avionics as an Indicator for Intelligent Vehicle Systems

How safety is perceived in conjunction with consumer products has much to do with its presentation to the buying public and the company reputation for performance and safety. As the automobile industry implements integrated vehicle safety and driver aid systems, the question of public perception of the true safety benefits would seem to parallel the highly automated systems of commercial aircraft, a market in which perceived benefits of flying certainly outweigh concerns of safety. It is suggested that the history of critical aircraft systems provides a model for the wide-based implementation of automated systems in automobiles. The requirement for safety in aircraft systems as an engineering design parameter takes on several forms such as wear-out, probability of catastrophic failure and mean time between replacement or repair (MTBR). For automobile systems as in aircraft, it is a multidimensional topic encompassing a variety of hardware and software functions, fail-safe or fail-operational capability and operator and control interaction. As with critical flight systems, the adherence to specific federal safety requirements is also a cost item to which all manufacturers must adhere, but that also provides a common baseline to which all companies must design. Long a requirement for the design of systems for military and commercial aircraft control, specific safety standards have produced methodologies for analysis and system mechanization that would suggest the operational safety design methods needed for automobiles. Ultimately, tradeoffs must be completed to attain an acceptable level of safety when compared to the cost for developing and selling the system. As seen with commercial aircraft, acceptance of product safety by the public is not based on understanding strict technical requirements but is primarily the result of witnessing many hours of fault free operation, and seeking opinions of those they feel are knowledgeable. This brief study will use data from p- reliminary concept studies for the Automated Highway System and developments by human factors analysts and sociologists concerning perceptions of risk to present an evaluation of the technological methods historically used to mitigate risk in critical aircraft systems and how they might apply to automation in automobiles.