Safety assurance at GM and using model management to support it

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When a vehicle is designed, the car maker - the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) - makes every effortto ensure that the vehicle will be safe and reliable. As vehicles have increased in complexity with the additionof software-enabled hybrid powertrains and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, the system design and safetyprocesses have had a corresponding increase in required effort and difficulty. Recently, seemingly minorincremental changes in the vehicle's software and/or physical design have resulted in safety recalls because ofunforeseen subsystem interactions that have reduced vehicle safety and/or reliability to unacceptable levels. Tohelp address these issues, OEMs and their suppliers collaborated to produce the standard ISO 26262 RoadVehicles - Functional Safety, which prescribes processes and their outputs that should be produced as part ofthe system, software and safety processes for vehicle features that require different Automotive Safety IntegrityLevels. As OEMs and suppliers strive to be consistent with ISO 26262, an increasingly important questionarises: when can design and safety assurance artefacts be safely reused and when do the processes and theresulting work products have to be redone? Automotive companies must address this key question if they wantto remain competitive and be able to deliver ever safer vehicles at a purchase cost that the public is willing topay. To help the Canadian automotive industry address this issue, this project will model the design and safetyartefacts and their relationships with explicit safety assurance arguments known as a (safety) assurance case.We will provide model management processes and tools to analyze the models and determine the impact of adesign change on the assurance case. This will help engineers determine which parts of the assurance case canbe safely reused and where it requires further engineering effort to demonstrate that the new system isacceptably safe. The work will be extended to manage models of safety assurance for entire product lines tohelp OEMs deal with the reality of manufacturing for global product development.