Preliminary safety analysis of frontal collision avoidance systems

Advanced vehicle control and safety systems (AVCSS) involve several safety critical functions such as vehicle longitudinal and lateral control. INRETS (French Institute of Research in the Transports and Their Safety) and California PATH (Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways) of University of California at Berkeley collaborated to set up a common approach for developing and validating a safe operational system. The paper deals with the preliminary safety analysis of a significant part of an AVCSS. As one example of AVCSS, frontal collision avoidance systems (FCAS) for ground vehicles is used as the target of the current study. The safety analyses based on safety requirements and functional decomposition have been conducted. To assist these analyses, static and dynamic modelling, by using ASA (structured analyses and automata) tools and failure mode effect and criticality analysis (FMECA), have been used to identify the safety functions and the measures to be implemented to cope with the identified hazards.