Safety in Automotive Industry: ISO 26262 Compliant Unit Testing

Automotive and many industrial equipment, in most cases, have as a requirement a compliance to functional safety standards. Looking back in the past, there are multiple events, that have led to what we now call the functional safety standards. One such accident, which resulted in 167 dead, was the Piper Alpha offshore drilling platform. Unfortunately, it is impossible to completely avoid accidents, but what one wants to achieve is to reduce the consequences of such events. This paper is an attempt to explain how important functional safety is for automotive industry. Furthermore, we discuss how ISO 26262 can be applied to buses, trucks, trailers and semi-trailers with the main focus on the ISO 26262 compliant unit testing.