"Getting cross-department cooperation is critical." Functional Safety at Jaguar Land Rover

Roger Rivett works as Functional Safety Technical Specialist at Jaguar Land Rover, UK and is a long-time member of the International ISO 26262 Committee. During this year’s 5th International Conference ISO 26262 in Berlin, Automotive IQ spoke with Mr. Rivett about the current challenges in the process of updating the standard and its impact on supplier relationships. Mr. Rivett, what is a critical factor for success when working in functional safety with the ISO Standard? It’s about pinning down the feature or system on the vehicle in terms of what the standard calls the "item definition". A lot of the systems that we’re doing now build on software legacy systems, and they are also distributed systems where functions run on different nodes and communicate across busses. That can be quite complex, so the critical factor of success is getting that defined well at the start before you start trying to apply the functional safety processes. It’s hard to do because you have to interface with legacy, and it’s distributed across different nodes, so responsibility for different bits of the system might be in different bits of the organisation. Getting cross-department cooperation is critical. If you can get that sorted out, it makes life a lot easier. If you don’t, you will miss things that come up later on, making the process much more difficult than it would otherwise be. One of the main requirements for being ISO compliant is that you are able to prove that your supply chain is also compliant. At Jaguar Land Rover, how do you handle this with your suppliers? Largely we deal with the tier 1s and part of our agreement with them is that they will manage the supply chain further on down. So, generally we wouldn’t get involved with the tier 2, 3 or 4 layers. We sometimes have discussions with the silicon vendors, which is more driven by the sorts of facilities, functions, power and capacity that we think we are going to need from the silicon vendors in the future. How about companies that already have a structured ISO-compliant development process in place; will they be affected by the revision in their day to day safety activities? I don’t think it will alter a great deal, because the fundamentals of the Standard will not be changed. If you’re working in trucks, buses or motorcycles and you have to adopt the standard that will make a big difference to you. If you’re working on the ADAS functions, and the new ideas about the safety of the intended function go in, then that might be a new bit of process that you would want to adopt. [inlinead] Considering the impact on global supply chains, do you see differences in the way European and US OEMs approach ISO 26262? When ISO 26262 was published in 2011, nobody was quite sure of the extent of the impact it would have, and the acceptance and prominence it would play. But it has been, I would say, universally adopted throughout the industry. A lot of the tier 1s are European, so they would be behind the standard anyhow. But even the American suppliers sell into Europe, so the American supply base has been reasonably on top of this topic right from the beginning. I think one of the things that was less certain was what the American OEMs would do: whether they would really buy into it, or whether they would keep their distance. As it turns out, they accept it as a global standard, and something that they have to meet. Europe is an enormous part of their market, and the Standard is strong in Europe, so they got on top of it very early on. Earlier this year the ISO 26262 committee held a meeting in Berlin to discuss the upcoming revision of ISO 26262. What are the main topics being discussed right now? The main thing right now is the extension of the scope to include buses, trucks and motorcycles. People working in those industries haven’t necessarily been following ISO 26262 to date, but with the second version that standard will be applicable to them. It will have a big impact on people working in that part of the industry. Trucks and buses play an important role within the industry. Did you come to an agreement in terms of what exactly you would like to address more with the standard in the future? The functional safety process starts with trying to identify and classify hazards. When you change the nature of the vehicle from a passenger car to a motorcycle, or to a bus or truck, then the nature and classification of the hazards are likely to change. That’s what people are working on; there has been work going on in this since before the start of the revision work. People have thought about this and started drafting material with a view to having it incorporated into the standard. What else is on the ISO agenda this year? There has been work ongoing within the semiconductor industry, which will largely result in more guidance in the Standard – not necessarily new requirements. The guidance is on how to apply the existing requirements down at the silicon level. There is also work ongoing looking at what is called "safety of the intended function", which is about how much effort should be put into making sure that the definition of the function is correct and safe in all operational situations. This is coming about because we are using more of the ADAS systems where that sort of algorithmic correctness for the ADAS system to function correctly becomes more important. How much of this actually gets into the Standard will be up to the committee to decide in plenary next September. Automated Functions and autonomous driving seems to be the big craze at the moment and every automaker is eager to develop this technology. Do you see challenges with the current formulation of the standard? Personally I don’t think that the second revision of the standard would be sufficient to say, "I can develop an autonomous vehicle and as long as I comply with the standard I’ve done all I need to do." I think you need to comply with the standard, but some of the other issues with autonomous vehicles haven’t really been thought through and discussed in the context of writing the standard. You need to think about the top level of the hazards and the classification and the safety goals, because the first standard is very much based on the idea that you have the driver in the loop. Now, with the advanced ADAS systems, we’re starting to think about letting the driver out of the loop a little, easing the driving burden. With autonomous cars, we think that a driver will never be in the loop. That’s quite a change from the systems we’ve been developing to date, and that’s still very much a research and development area. Mr. Rivett, thank you very much. Related Stories: ISO 26262 - A Global outlook for 2015

"Getting cross-department cooperation is critical." Functional Safety at Jaguar Land Rover

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