According to ISO 26262 (the international standard on functional safety for automotive industry), the functional safety should be considered during the whole automotive systems life cycle from the design phase throughout the production phase. In order to satisfy the standard, the automotive and related industry needs to take appropriate actions while carrying out a variety of development activities. This paper presents an approach to coping with the standard. Analyzing the standard indicates that the safety issues of the automotive systems should be handled with a system's view whereas the conventional approach to solving the issues has been practiced with focus on the component's level. The aforementioned system's view implies that the functional safety shall be incorporated in the system design from both the system's life-cycle view and the hierarchical view for the structure. In light of this, the systems engineering framework can be quite appropriate in the functional safety development and thus has been taken in this paper as a problem solving approach. Of various design issues, the analysis and verification of the safety requirements for functional safety is a key study subject of the paper. Note, in particular, that the conventional FMEA (failure mode effects analysis) and FTA (fault tree analysis) methods seem to be partly relying on the insufficient experience and knowledge of the engineers. To improve this, a systematic method is studied here and the result is applied in the design of an ABS braking system as a case study.

In modern systems design and development, one of the key issues is considered to be related with how to reflect faithfully the stakeholder requirements including customer requirements therein, thereby successfully implementing the system functions derived from the requirements. On the other hand, the issue of safety management is also becoming greatly important these days, particularly in the operational phase of the systems under development. An approach to safety management can be based on the use of the failure mode effect and analysis (FMEA), which has been a core method adopted in automotive industry to reduce the potential failure. The fact that a successful development of cars needs to consider both the complexity and failure throughout the whole life cycle calls for the necessity of applying the systems engineering (SE) process. To meet such a need, in this paper a method of FMEA is developed based on the SE concept. To do so, a process model is derived first in order to identify the required activities that must be satisfied in automotive design while reducing the possibility of failure. Specifically, the stakeholder requirements were analyzed first to derive a set of functions, which subsequentially leads to the task of identifying necessary HW/SW components. Then the derived functions were allocated to appropriate HW/SW components. During this design process, the traceability between the functions and HW/SW components were generated. The traceability can play a key role when FMEA is performed to predict the potential failure that can be described with the routes from the components through the linked functions. As a case study, the developed process model has been applied in a project carried out in practice. The results turned out to demonstrate the usefulness of the approach.