ISO 26262: Automotive Functional Safety

Every engineered system has risks: risks to people, risks to the environment, and risks to the surrounding infrastructure. Functional safety is the planned reduction of those risks through automated safety systems. This involves a holistic analysis - evaluating all of a vehicles systems as an entire working unit to determine how the vehicle’s hardware and software interact and how it responds to user inputs and the environment in which it is expected to function.

Functional safety extends to the use of electronics, software, and other types of systems to mitigate risk for a vehicle, typically accomplished through equipment with sensory, logic, and control elements. These systems can include features that make decisions with regards to the autonomous control of the vehicle. In many cases these features would be classified as ASIL-D, the highest classification of injury risk defined in ISO 26262 and as such require the highest level of scrutiny when assessing risks and ensuring that safety goals are sufficient and have been achieved.

Intertek has a full scope of services to support functional safety goals and ISO 26262 compliance;

• Product design troubleshooting & recommendations
• R&D support
• Identify/solve regulatory & certification requirements
• Identify/solve testing challenges
• Performance & safety assessments
• Systems plan development, including analysis on integrated components
• Assistance with documentation
• New technology requirements
• New automotive market demand
• Simplifying complex requirements
• Design for compliance with current/upcoming regulations
• Avoid common failure pitfalls
• Resolve existing issues and anticipate future challenges
• NRTL Functional Safety Certification to ISO 26262
• IEC 61508 SIL Mark
• UL 4600: Standard for Safety for the Evaluation of Autonomous Products
• ISO 21434: Automotive Cybersecurity Solutions

Automotive Functional Safety Resources

Automotive Functional Safety & Cybersecurity FAQs
Automotive Functional Safety & Cybersecurity On-demand Webinar
Functional Safety in the Automotive Industry On-demand Webinar