Assuring functional safety in automotive software through pattern-based requirements development

An emerging standard for functional safety in road vehicles, the ISO 26262, is expected to impose greater stringency on the practice of automotive systems and software engineering. In particular, a need exists for increased rigor during requirements development not only to be compliant with some key parts of the standard, but also to obtain early assurance of functional safety. In this paper, we present pattern-based requirements development, using patterns of timed automata and property specifications, as a feasible, rigorous and model-based method to address this need. As preliminary validation, we apply it to verify functional safety requirements for a simple but non-trivial real example of an embedded car-window controller.