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The modern road vehicle has an essential dependence on advanced electronics to control functionality and to deliver demands for safety, environmental efficiency, comfort and brand differentiation required by manufacturers, legislators and consumers. System functional safety is a central part of the design and implementation of these systems. To ensure common approaches in a global marketplace, and avoid duplicated effort, it is necessary to have consensus in the form of standards and guidelines. While the standards-making bodies take the lead in such activities, there is also an important role for industry consensus groups. This paper presents a short overview of standards relevant to safety-related software development in road vehicles, with suggestions for areas in which future improvements could be undertaken.

In 1994 a consortium of automotive companies in the UK (MISRA) published a set of guidelines intended to assist in the development of safe and reliable vehicle-based software. These guidelines were supplemented in 1998 with recommendations on the safe use of the C programming language. This paper reviews the main issues in the guidelines, including safety analysis and the use of safety integrity levels (SILs). An example of how these guidelines have been used by a UK OEM in the procurement of an electronic system from a US supplier is given.