Once a safety concept has been defined, confirmation of the effectiveness of the measures is needed. In this sense effectiveness means that the risk of the original hazardous event is reduced, and no unacceptable new risks are introduced.
A verification and validation process shall be defined to clarify the responsibilities of each stakeholder involved in the development process, e.g. suppliers for hardware elements, software and ECU, and on the OEM side the function and vehicle integration (and most likely also part of the software). Verification is an evaluation of whether the system complies with certain requirements. This includes determining whether the system has the required functionalities and whether these functionalities are working as intended, without errors, considering certain constraints.
To finally achieve a safe function, the workshare for “who is verifying what, how and why”, i.e. workers, test goals, test methods and test targets, needs to be defined and described (for details, see the ‘Testing’ topic). For FuSa it is essential that there are no gaps in the overall verification.
Main Question:
Does a strategy exist to validate the safety concept?
Sub-Questions:
- Are there measures to confirm the effectiveness of the safety concept?
- Do criteria exist that allow the definition of whether a vehicle behaviour can be accepted as safe?
- Is a verification and validation process defined, that covers the various integration steps of software, hardware, function and vehicle in their entirety?
- Is the successful mitigation of all findings from the hazard analysis confirmed during verification activities?