Effective management of functional safety for ISO 26262 standard

The ISO 26262 standard is strongly affecting today´s development behavior in the Automotive Industry. It defines the new development process requirements for the shift from the quality management system (QMS, ISO/TS 16949) to a safety oriented work culture. There are four key barriers to make this shift; 1) the existing business decision environment based only on cost, 2) the typical project work culture to directly jump to a solution without first defining the requirements (as defined by the “V” model), 3) the knowledge gap on how to shift from qualitative to quantitative product reliability assessment and 4) the time and awareness to manage the implementation of the additional safety confirmation measures. The challenge for the automotive industry is to overcome these barriers as established with the ISO/TS16949 quality management system processes. The ISO 26262 standard has covered the first three barriers by; 1) defining the requirements for a good safety culture, 2) deriving the safety requirements from the “Top Down”, 3) providing a quantitative product reliability or failure in Time (FIT) methodology. However, the standard only defined how a single developer needs to manage the functional safety but not how to address the development interfaces between the multiple organization during the safety lifecycle. With the learning from the Aerospace & Aviation industry it would be beneficial to the Automotive Industry to improve the interaction between the distributed developers. The Aerospace & Aviations “Flight Readiness Review” is a proven Safety Management Review network. To further improve the management of functional safety in the Automotive industry, this paper proposes to incorporate a “Safety Manager Review” network within the next revision of the ISO 26262 standard. The key benefits that would be achieved are: 1) Provide “closed loop” learning with common definition- throughout the multiple organisation. 2) Earlier resolution of the safety anomalies during the product lifecycle. 3) A more effective Management of Functional Safety by implementing the decisions based on field data. With this proposal in place the multiple organisation would have a better chance to confirm that the Safety Function complies adequately to the quantitative targets. Only when all three levels of the distributed developers have the same process language and quantitative units, the safety targets can be accomplished.