Comparing Different Levels of Technical Systems for a Modular Safety Approval—Why the State of the Art Does Not Dispense with System Tests Yet

Björn Klamann and Hermann Winner
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Björn Klamann: Institute of Automotive Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Darmstadt, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany
Hermann Winner: Institute of Automotive Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Darmstadt, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 22, 1-16

Abstract: While systems in the automotive industry have become increasingly complex, the related processes require comprehensive testing to be carried out at lower levels of a system. Nevertheless, the final safety validation is still required to be carried out at the system level by automotive standards like ISO 26262. Using its guidelines for the development of automated vehicles and applying them for field operation tests has been proven to be economically unfeasible. The concept of a modular safety approval provides the opportunity to reduce the testing effort after updates and for a broader set of vehicle variants. In this paper, we present insufficiencies that occur on lower levels of hierarchy compared to the system level. Using a completely new approach, we show that errors arise due to faulty decomposition processes wherein, e.g., functions, test scenarios, risks, or requirements of a system are decomposed to the module level. Thus, we identify three main categories of errors: insufficiently functional architectures, performing the wrong tests, and performing the right tests wrongly. We provide more detailed errors and present examples from the research project UNICAR agil . Finally, these findings are taken to define rules for the development and testing of modules to dispense with system tests.

Keywords: safety validation; automated driving systems; decomposition; modular safety approval; modular testing; fault tree analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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