Search Results

With the advent of ISO 26262 there is an increased emphasis on top-down design in the automotive industry. While the standard delivers a best practice framework and a reference safety lifecycle, it lacks detailed requirements for its various constituent phases. The lack of guidance becomes especially evident for the reuse of legacy components and subsystems, the most common scenario in the cost-sensitive automotive domain, leaving vehicle architects and safety engineers to rely on experience without methodological support for their decisions. This poses particular challenges in the industry which is currently undergoing many significant changes due to new features like connectivity, servitization, electrification and automation. In this paper we focus on automated driving where multiple subsystems, both new and legacy, need to coordinate to realize a safety-critical function.

Heavy commercial vehicles constitute the dominant form of inland freight transport. There is a strong interest in making such vehicles autonomous (self-driving), in order to improve safety and the economics of fleet operation. Autonomy concerns affect a number of key systems within the vehicle. One such key system is brakes, which need to remain continuously available throughout vehicle operation. This paper presents a fail-operational functional brake architecture for autonomous heavy commercial vehicles. The architecture is based on a reconfiguration of the existing brake systems in a typical vehicle, in order to attain dynamic, diversified redundancy along with desired brake performance. Specifically, the parking brake is modified to act as a secondary brake with capabilities for monitoring and intervention of the primary brake system.