Safety Assessment of Advanced Vehicle Control and Safety Systems (AVCSS): A Case Study

Advanced Vehicle Control and Safety Systems (AVCSS) involve several safety critical functionssuch as vehicle longitudinal and lateral control. It is required that the system be able to prevent ormitigate hazardous conditions. The system must be capable of tolerating failures and, whenfailures are no longer tolerable, be fail-safe. In order to verify the safety of a system, anassessment or evaluation methodology must be developed and implemented prior toimplementation of new technologies such that errors in the processes of specification, design,development, and integration can be revealed in order to prevent hazardous consequences. Sincesome AVCSS technologies will begin to be implemented widely in the next few years (such asadaptive cruise control), timely development of a sound safety assessment/evaluation method forAVCSS is crucial.