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The ISO 26262 standard for functional safety was first released in 2011 and has been widely incorporated by most OEMs and Tier1 suppliers. The design and conformance of the product to functional safety standards is strongly intertwined with the product development cycle and needs to be carefully managed. The consideration for functional safety needs to begin right from the product’s concept phase through engineering and production and finally decommissioning. The application of the standard in a project can bring significant challenges especially to managers who are relatively new to the standard. This paper provides some guidelines on the key tasks involved in managing ISO26262 in projects and some ways to approach them. The paper is expected to help managers manage ISO26262 compliant projects. The paper also tries to come up with a metric that can be used for resource estimation for implementing ISO26262 in projects.

One of the key premises of the ISO 26262 functional safety standard is the development of an appropriate Technical Safety Concept for the item under development. This is specified in detail in Part 4 of the standard - Product development at the system level. The Technical safety requirements and the technical safety concept form the basis for deriving the hardware and software safety requirements that are then used by engineering teams for developing a safe product. Just like any other form of product development, making multiple revisions of the requirements are highly undesirable. This is primarily due to cost increases, chances of having inconsistencies within work products and its impact on the overall project schedule. Good technical safety requirements are in fact the foundation for an effective functional safety implementation.

In ISO 26262, the top-level safety goals are derived using the Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment. Functional safety requirements (FSRs) are then derived from these safety goals in the concept phase (ISO 26262-3:2011). The standard does not call out a specific method to develop these FSRs from safety goals. However, ISO 26262-8:2011, Clause 6, does establish requirements to ensure consistent management and correct specification of safety requirements with respect to their attributes and characteristics throughout the safety lifecycle. Hence, there are expectations on the part of system engineers to bridge this gap. The method proposed in this paper utilizes concepts from process modeling to ensure the completeness of these requirements, eliminate any external inconsistencies between them and improve verifiability.

The complexity of both hardware and software has increased significantly in automotive over the past decade. This is apparent even in the compact passenger car market segment where the presence of electronic control units (ECU) has nearly tripled. In today's luxury vehicles, software can reach 100 million lines of code and are only projected to increase. Without preventive measures, the risk of safety-related system malfunction becomes unacceptably too high. The functional safety standard ISO 26262, released as first edition in 2011, provides crucial safety-related requirements for passenger vehicles. Although the standard defines the proper development for safety-related systems to ensure the avoidance of a hazard, it's implication for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) is not clearly defined. This paper outlines the impact of ISO 26262 for EMC related issues, and discusses the standard's implications for EMC requirements on the present EMC practices for production vehicles.

Due to increasing concerns with petroleum usage and the increasing federal fuel economy regulations, electric powertrains have become more accepted by automotive manufacturers. The lithium-ion batteries employed in such systems are typically managed by an electronic battery management system (BMS). The BMS manages the battery to prevent thermal runaway and related thermal events, and is responsible for safety related functions such as thermal management, cell balancing, and controlling the connection to the vehicle's high-voltage DC bus. The ISO 26262 standard, introduced in final form in 2011, provides a framework for developing and validating automotive products that are safe from electronic and electrical system malfunctions, including BMS malfunctions, in passenger vehicles. This paper discusses options for BMS system development in accordance with ISO 26262. Hazards and risks of BMS malfunctions are identified and classified according to the standard.