Functional Safety and Development Process Capability for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) require the extension of the systems engineering approach to a higher system level. Up to now, vehicles could be considered as closed systems while in future they have to be seen as components of an open system with ad hoc interfaces. Since ITS influence the series development and production of single vehicles, standards and procedures of process quality, systems engineering and functional safety apply for this higher level as well. The paper discusses the impact of those standards to the design of ITS and the role of model-based software and service oriented architectures (SOA) as means for process quality and functional safety assurance. It emphasizes on the mutual synergies between process capability standards, functional safety, model-based development and design for variability. Finally, it shows an approach for the design of ad hoc and distributed systems proposed by the authors.