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The early phases in safety engineering (the Item Definition and the Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (H+R)) set the foundation for the overall development of safety-relevant systems. Furthermore, Hazards and their related risks affect all manufacturers in the same way. Hence, a common understanding and appraisal of Hazards should be established in a systematic way. Numerous methods and techniques for formalizations und structuring of processes and artifacts in safety critical development exist, but most of those deal with challenges arising once a hazard is defined and one is interested in its origin, or its mitigation strategy. The research and practical approaches to support the prerequisite for all the other techniques, the hazard analysis and risk assessment, is still weak. We therefore present in this paper SAHARA, a systematic approach for hazard analysis and risk assessment.

Software has rapidly gained importance as a driver for innovation in automobiles. Since many safety-related automotive systems make intensive use of software, the upcoming ISO 26262 poses several requirements addressing software development, including safety analyses for software. For software, however, safety analysis techniques are seldom applied in practice. It is unclear how to apply them and in many cases even their usefulness in general is questioned. This article illustrates why software safety analyses are indispensable, how they can be efficiently applied to complex systems, and how they relate to existing software quality assurance techniques and system safety analyses.