Search Results

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.