ISO 26262

Titled "Road vehicles – Functional safety", ISO 26262 is an international standard for functional safety of electrical and/or electronic systems in production automobiles defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2011.

Functional safety features form an integral part of each automotive product development phase, ranging from the specification, to design, implementation, integration, verification, validation, and production release. The standard ISO 26262 is an adaptation of the Functional Safety standard IEC 61508 for Automotive Electric/Electronic Systems. ISO 26262 defines functional safety for automotive equipment applicable throughout the lifecycle of all automotive electronic and electrical safety-related systems.

The first edition, published on 11 November 2011, is intended to be applied to electrical and/or electronic systems installed in "series production passenger cars" with a maximum gross weight of 3500 kg. It aims to address possible hazards caused by the malfunctioning behaviour of electronic and electrical systems.

Although entitled "Road vehicles – Functional safety" the standard relates to the functional safety of Electrical and Electronic systems, not to that of systems as a whole or of their mechanical subsystems.

Like its parent standard, IEC 61508, ISO 26262 is a risk-based safety standard, where the risk of hazardous operational situations is qualitatively assessed and safety measures are defined to avoid or control systematic failures and to detect or control random hardware failures, or mitigate their effects.

Goals of ISO 26262:

The standard consists of 9 normative parts and a guideline for the ISO 26262 as the 10th part.

The ten parts of ISO 26262:

ISO 26262 specifies a vocabulary (a Project Glossary) of terms, definitions, and abbreviations for application in all parts of the standard. Of particular importance is the careful definition of fault, error, and failure as these terms are key to the standard’s definitions of functional safety processes, particularly in the consideration that "A fault can manifest itself as an error ... and the error can ultimately cause a failure".

Note: In contrast to the formal vocabularies defined for other Functional Safety standards, Fault Tolerance is not explicitly defined within this standard -- it is assumed impossible to comprehend all possible faults in a system. Functional Safety rather than Fault Tolerance is the objective of the standard. ISO 26262 does not use the (IEC 61508) terms SFF and hardware fault tolerance. The terms single point faults metric and latent faults metric are used instead.

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