Modeling a Safety- and Automotive-Oriented Process Line to Enable Reuse and Flexible Process Derivation

ISO 26262 is a recently introduced automotive functional safety standard. This standard imposes new requirements that must be fulfilled for conformance purposes. Thus, companies used to develop safety-related E/E systems in compliance with either only Automotive SPICE (ASPICE) or a combination of ASPICE and IEC 61508 have to quickly perform a gap analysis in order to introduce adequate changes in their way of working. Implementing such changes in a visionary way with expectations of a long-term payback is an urgent open issue. To contribute to addressing such issue, in this paper, we introduce a safety-oriented process line-based methodological framework to model commonalities and variabilities (changes) between the standards to enable reuse and flexible process derivation. To show the usefulness of our approach, we apply it to model a process-phase line for the development of safety-critical control units. Finally, we provide our lessons learned and concluding remarks.