A cyber-physical-social approach for engineering functional safety requirements for automotive systems

Several approaches have been developed to assist automotive system manufacturers in designing safer vehicles by facilitating compliance with functional safety standards. However, most of these approaches either mainly focus on the technical aspects of automotive systems and ignore the social ones, or they provide inadequate analysis of such important aspects. To this end, we propose a model-based approach for modeling and analyzing the Functional Safety Requirements (FSR) for automotive systems, which considers both the technical and social aspects of such systems. This approach is based on both the ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS 21448 standards, and it proposes a detailed engineering methodology to assist designers while modeling and analyzing FSR. In particular, this approach proposes a UML profile for modeling the FSR of the automotive system starting from item definition until safety validation, and it offers constraints expressed in Object Constraint Language (OCL) to be used for the verification of FSR models. We demonstrated the applicability and usefulness of the approach relying on a realistic example from the automotive domain, and we also evaluated the usability and utility of the approach with potential end-users.