Safety-Related Availability in the Power Supply Domain

Abstract

The automotive industry is currently driven by the megatrends electrification, automated driving and connectivity. To cope with these trends, new functionalities and electrical and/or electronic (E/E) systems need to be developed and deployed. Independent of the implementation of E/E systems, their power input shall be ensured by the power supply system as a shared resource – leading to increased functional safety requirements for power supply systems. If the loss of an item’s functionality can lead to a hazardous event, a safety goal (SG) specifying a safety-related availability (SaRA) requirement is derived. Thereby, switching to passive mode typically cannot be considered a safe state. To address an SG specifying a SaRA requirement, fault avoidance, fault forecasting and/or fault tolerance measures can be applied. In the case of fault tolerance measures implemented by redundancy, which leads to fail-active behavior, the performance of the backup system during nominal operation and after the first fault can be further refined. In this study, SaRA in the context of ISO 26262 is evaluated in detail and mapped to an example of the power supply domain.

Keywords

• Automotive electronics
• automotive engineering
• functional safety
• ISO 26262
• power supplies
• reliability