Abstract. The upcoming ISO26262 standard, which deals with the functional safety of road vehicles, will induce car manufacturers to adapt the way in which vehicle systems are usually developed. To achieve this, more rigorous development processes along with new tools and techniques will most certainly be necessary. This paper presents an overview of current initiatives at Renault dealing with the improvement of development processes for mechatronic systems to comply with ISO 26262. It focuses on introducing more formalization in the systems engineering design process via the definition of an ontology to formalize the concepts and knowledge of the systems engineering, functional safety and automotive specialty domains (e.g. braking, energy management). The ontology is at the heart of our improvement initiatives since it allows establishing logical consistency of the whole design process. A regenerative hybrid braking system integrated into a full electrical vehicle will serve as the case study for the evaluation of the improvements made possible by the approach.

This paper presents the formalization of an innovative design process for automotive safety-critical systems. The objects and data used or produced throughout the different steps of the system design process (e.g. requirements, safety goals, functions, components, validation and verification activities…) are formalized in an integrated data model (or meta model). Besides the novel aspects of the design process, which will only be briefly mentioned in this paper, the originality of the approach lies on the combination of two normally independent models: a Systems Engineering data model and an Automotive Safety data model. The latter stems from the future ISO26262 standard relative to the safety of automotive embedded systems. The results presented in this paper are part of the Systems Engineering deployment initiative at Renault and represent the very first efforts aiming at the compliance with the future ISO26262 standard.