Safety Assessment and Design of Dependable Cybercars: For today and the future

Future generations of automobiles (also known as cybercars) will further increase the proliferation of electronic control units (ECUs) to contrive novel infotainment and distributed control applications. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26262 is an automotive standard that designates automotive safety integrity levels (ASILs) to indicate the criticality associated with a function. This article aims to provide a concise discussion on the safety assessment and design of dependable cybercars considering the current state of the art and future perspectives. I will elaborate on the risk assessment and design of dependable cybercars as stipulated in ISO 26262 and classify failure modes in cybercars and the methods to assess these failures. I will also discuss various hardware architectural metrics to assess safety and dependability of a cybercar design as well as various research challenges and future research directions for realizing safe and dependable cybercars.