A Case Study on Safety Cases in the Automotive Domain: Modules, Patterns, and Models

Driven by market needs and laws, automotive manufacturers develop ever more feature-rich and complex vehicles. This new functionality plays even an active role in driving, what poses many new challenges on assuring the safety of the vehicle. Safety cases constitute a proven technique to systematically use existing information about a system, its environment, and development context to show its safety. We construct the safety case for a cruise control system describe in a case study in the automotive domain with a special consideration of existing domain-specific models. In the case study, we identify generic safety case modules and several reoccurring patterns, which will simplify the development of future automotive safety cases.