Failure mode and effect analysis based on electric and electronic architectures of vehicles to support the safety lifecycle ISO/DIS 26262

The draft international standard under development ISO 26262 (Road Vehicles - Functional safety -) describes a safety lifecycle for road vehicles and thereby influences all parts of development, production, operation and decommissioning. Starting from 2011, all developments of new cars should be aligned to this standard. The rapid application and adaption of the ISO 26262 is mandatory to develop safe, advanced and competitive automotive systems and systems of systems. The failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a well applied engineering quality method in the automotive industry and proposed by the ISO 26262 for several analyses. The communication structure of the automotive control system are specified by the electric and electronic architecture (EEA). For a short time all this information can be processed in one tool. It can form an important contribution to the determination of input data for safety assessments. With the FMEA flow embedded in the EEA modeling, analysis can be rapidly provided with altered input data resulting from architecture modifications. This paper presents a formalized tool flow for rapid determination and accumulation of input data for failure mode and effect analysis based on an EEA model, the accomplishment of the analysis within an EEA modeling tool and the automated generation of reports, documenting the results from the FMEA according to a predefined form.