Stage: Quantitative Safety Target for Functional Safety and SOTIF(932236)

Wat ga je doen?

It is expected that Autonomous Vehicles (AV) will be safer than manual driven vehicles. The safety of AV will be achieved through robust development process, countless tests to measure the AV  performance and by introducing threshold to not exceed.   

The goal is to have a road traffic system with zero accidents (Vision Zero). However, this is long term goal. In the meantime Automotive Stakeholders should identify the acceptable level of safety to allow an AV to operate safely in the traffic system. In few words, it should be established when safe is safe enough. 

The current regulatory approach is mainly based on qualitative rather than quantitative targets. However, there are several on-going discussions to quantify the level of safety (i.e. Quantitative Safety Target). For instance, the Functional Safety and Safety of Intended functionality (SOTIF) do not include safety metrics (e.g. probability of occurrence of having accidents) in the regulation requirements. These safety metrics can improve the level of safety, can provide tools for an assessor to compare the level of safety achieved by different vehicles and will be crucial to assure that the level of safety in the Netherlands will be increased with the introduction of AV. In addition, the safety metrics can indirectly drive the OEMs to Fail-Safe architecture, to design for minimizing the hazard as well as to assure the safety during the operational phase

The main goals of this topic are:

• Identification of Safety metrics for Functional Safety and Safety of Intended functionalities (separated and combined)
• Recommendation for the validation/assessment of the Safety Metrics for Functional Safety and Safety of Intended functionalities

In this perspective, it is expected that the intern will do:

• An investigation on where and how quantitative safety metrics are used (i.e. checking automotive standards and other industries practises)
• An investigation on the accident/incident statistics to derive appropriate metrics/targets(i.e. Netherland, EU, US data)
• An investigation on Engineering Design Handbooks/technical documents (i.e. reliability handbook/standards and white paper)  to derive dedicated metrics/targets and to identify possible limitations (e.g. Software). 
• An investigation on the methodologies to validate and assess the  quantitative safety metrics (note: including a possible approach to validate the safety target)
• An Experiment to validate the safety target (e.g. simulation with randomized scenarios or scenario test approach)