Towards a safer development of driver assistance systems by applying requirements-based methods

The development of intelligent transport systems such as driver assistance systems currently faces increasing system complexity and a growing number of requirements, e.g. from safety standards. Thus, requirements engineering activities gain an increasingly important role when it comes to the development of safety-critical transport systems. As an example, the introduction of ISO 26262 in the automotive domain requires the adaptation of existing industrial development processes to comply with the upcoming standard. The proposed methods address the new demand in requirements management for a safer development of driver assistance systems. By means of ontologies, domain requirements such as from ISO 26262 are formalized providing a reference model to support semi-automated requirements discovery. Based on this formalized knowledge and an automatically identified selection criterion such as the system's Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), the large set of process and product related requirements of ISO 26262 is tailored to a reduced set of applicable steps and methods for a project specific development process. The proposed methods have been implemented in a prototype toolchain. In terms of driver assistance systems, a lane departure warning system is used as an application example to illustrate the proceeding.