Assessing Safety of an Automated Vehicle Through Model-Driven Analysis and Simulation

Validating the safety of automated systems is a highly complex task that cannot be done effectively through one validation methodology alone. As a result, current trends recommend adopting a multi-pillar approach for the validation of such systems. In this paper, we share our experience in applying a combined safety approach for the safety evaluation of an automated vehicle. The evaluation approach couples Model-Driven Engineering paradigm and simulation for a detailed assessment of critical scenarios. Based on a system model, we perform analytical safety analysis to identify the critical failures that may lead to undesired events. The analytical analysis is complemented by extensive simulation experiments to assess finer the impact of the identified malfunctions. The overall approach builds upon a tool chain consisting of Physistem as a modeling framework, Papyrus-Sophia for dysfunctional analysis support, and Phisim as a simulation environment. We report on the experiment results and discuss the advantages and limitations that the proposed approach brings for the evaluation of safety-critical automated systems.