Automotive safety is the study and practice of designing, building, equipping, and regulating motor vehicles, so that traffic accidents involving motor vehicles happen less often and cause less damage. Road design is a large part of road traffic safety.
Concern was voiced about the rising number of traffic-related fatalities and injuries around the turn of the twentieth century. Medical professionals, safety advocates, engineers, and journalists discussed different perspectives on causes of accidents, injuries, and deaths. Various causes were identified, including driver error, poor vehicle and road design, and inadequate highway engineering.
Efforts to maintain the advantages of mobility, while avoiding its often catastrophic repercussions, have zeroed in on certain issues, such as driver behavior management, vehicle redesign, and environmental enhancements for safer driving. It took decades to learn about ranking and reducing these dangers.
Evaluating Risk
An automobile’s functional safety program begins with a Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA) to determine what dangers may arise. As a general rule, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are tasked with conducting HARAs on vehicle-level features to identify possible hazards and hazard scenarios and provide the necessary risk reduction threshold for each.
HARAs include the likelihood and severity of adverse outcomes and the degree of control required to correct malfunctioning behavior, to limit possible hazards while assessing the risk associated with a given driving scenario.
HARAs are performed on vehicle-level characteristics, not on individual components or elements. Several driving situations are taken into account for each possible risk. For instance, operating speed and driving circumstances would be used in a forward collision avoidance system to evaluate the risk of unintended braking. If the supplier receives a HARA from the OEM and finds new risks or catastrophic outcomes, it may suggest changes to the HARA.
Testing, Integrating, And Putting Out Software All The Time
The V-model is used to verify that autos have adequate levels of functional safety throughout the whole design process. The V-model stipulates that a phase of testing must correspond to each step of the development process. Distributors do routine quality assurance checks on the software and hardware development methods they use to ensure that they meet industry standards.
Audits and functional safety assessments are carried out on all eligible work items. These might be carried out by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), suppliers, or independent firms. The ASIL rating indicates the degree of independence that the audits and assessments should maintain.
Regarding autos, “functional safety” extends well beyond the point of sale. Over-the-air updates (also known as OTA updates) have come a long way, and now they’re making new opportunities for continuous development. Distributing software updates not at a dealership but across Wi-Fi and cellular networks may help original equipment manufacturers save money on repairs. It is essential to remember that the OTA function opens the system up to new flaws in terms of its physical and digital levels of security.
Functional safety requires an all-encompassing management strategy to achieve optimum oversight and complete system integration. Because we are familiar with both the central processing unit and the peripheral nervous system of the vehicle, Aptiv is in a position to help our clients accomplish the functional safety goals they have set for themselves.
Putting A Risk Reduction Level On Something?
The OEM gives each possible threat an Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) grade during the HARA. To have faith that the feature will function securely, a lower ASIL grade suggests a smaller level of risk reduction is required?
The HARA will return a QM rating if the possible hazard is not connected to safety and is instead categorized as a quality management problem that falls within the purview of the supplier’s quality management system. ASIL-A is the lowest possible rating, and ASIL-D is the highest.
It is possible to classify a situation as QM, if the driver can easily perceive the failure and makes the decision to have the car towed to a mechanic or drive more cautiously in light of the situation, such as when the speed indicator fails during the vehicle start in the morning and shows no information at all (i.e., it’s set to zero all the time).
That is to say, the scenario’s severity is modest compared to how easily it can be avoided. However, if the driver loses control of the vehicle because the brakes fail while traveling at high speed, ASIL-D would apply because of the high probability of serious injury.
ISO 26262 utilizes the ASIL rating to assess the stringency of the development stages that the supplier must take and sets standards for safety objectives, such as the following, to handle these situations appropriately:
● Safety concept: –
How a malfunction is recognized and remedied is defined by the safety concept (or safety strategy). More severe failure detection and response capabilities are needed for systems with higher ASIL ratings.
● Failures in time: –
Regarding vehicle reliability, the FIT rate is the maximum number of breakdowns that may occur in a given time. The FIT rate required by the ASIL certification must be met by the vehicle; however, the FIT rate selected by the OEM for the system’s underlying components is up to them.
● Safety requirements: –
The safety rules govern the right reaction to any given failure. In the event of an internal safety-relevant problem, such as memory corruption being detected by a sensor, a fail-silent system could immediately cut off communication through the controller area network to signal its failure condition to other systems.
While safety regulations often outline such a mechanism, there are better options than a fail-silent system. For its autonomous driving capabilities, for instance, the car may use a fail-operational system, which calls for a backup system to take over temporarily while the original system is repaired. Systematic failures are less likely if the feature is developed using strict guidelines.
Conclusion
Reducing injuries sustained in motor vehicle collisions and eliminating fatalities are the primary goals of research, development, construction, and regulatory efforts in automobile safety. These are the primary goals of research, development, construction, and regulatory efforts. One overarching goal is to ensure that the layout of highways is designed with the safety of both drivers and passengers in mind.
