Context: Safety analysis is a predominant activity in developing safety-critical systems. It is a highly cooperative task among multiple functional departments due to increasingly sophisticated safety-critical systems and close-knit development processes. Communication occurs pervasively. Motivation: Effective communication channels among multiple functional departments influence safety analysis quality as well as a safe product delivery. However, the use of communication channels during safety analysis is sometimes arbitrary and poses challenges. Objective: In this article, we aim to investigate the existing communication channels, their usage frequencies, their purposes and challenges during safety analysis in industry. Method:We conducted a multiple case study by surveying 39 experts and interviewing 21 experts in safety-critical companies including software developers, quality engineers and functional safety managers. Direct observations and documentation review were also conducted. Results: Popular communication channels during safety analysis include formal meetings, project coordination tools, documentation and telephone. Email, personal discussion, training, internal communication software and boards are also in use. Training involving safety analysis happens 1-4 times per year, while other aforementioned communication channels happen ranging from 1-4 times per day to 1-4 times per month. We summarise 28 purposes of using these aforementioned communication channels. Communication happens mostly for the purpose of clarifying safety requirements, fixing temporary problems, conflicts and obstacles and sharing safety knowledge. The top 10 challenges are: (1) sensitiveness and confidentiality of safety analysis information; (2) fragmented safety analysis information;(3) inconsistent safety analysis information; (4) asynchronous channels; (5) a lack of tool support; (6) misunderstanding between developers and safety analysts; (7) language, geographic and culture limitations; (8) unwillingness to communicate (groupthink); (9) storage, authority, regulation and monitoring of safety analysis information; (10) a lack of documentation concerning safety analysis to support communication. Conclusion: During safety analysis, to use communication channels effectively and avoid challenges, a clear purpose of communication during safety analysis should be established at the beginning. We have limitations primarily on the research context namely the scope of domains, participants and countries. To derive countermeasures of fixing the top 10 challenges are potential next steps. OutlineThe article is organised as follows. In Section 2, we describe the background of communication channels and the related work regarding our study. We define a theoretical lens of communication channels during safety analysis in Section 3. Section 4 presents the case study design including context, research questions, data collection and analysis procedures. In Section 5, we report our study results. We discuss our implications and limitations i...
With a significantly increasing number of electrical and electronic systems within road vehicles, the complexity of such systems dramatically increases. To prevent these increasingly complex systems from becoming more and more fault‐prone is one of the most important challenges of the future. Systems have to be intrinsically safe whereby owing to the cost pressure within the automotive industry, it is not possible just to double or triple the systems, as it is usual in the avionics industry. This chapter describes the general concept of vehicle safety—especially with regard to functional safety that came into focus within recent years with the advent of a new standard for functional safety of road vehicles—the ISO 26262. This chapter gives an overview over the trends why safety of road vehicles becomes more and more important in future, what are the special constraints of the automotive industry. Furthermore, we explain the legal point of view and the key concept of ISO 26262, for example, the method of hazard analysis and risk assessment, the concept of SEooC (safety element out of context), the confidence in the use of software tools, and the random hardware faults and hardware metrics. Some side issues of vehicle safety such as the quality assurance concept and the OBD (on‐board diagnosis) are described.
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