Developing Complex Safety Critical Systems in Complex Supply Chains

Abstract

The emergence of high performance high complexity automotive systems for autonomous driving involves introducing complex supply chains to the system design and managing them in a structured way. Based on current estimates a fully autonomous car could require up to 1 billion lines of code with a code base involving dozens of suppliers. This paper identifies and discusses the complexities involved when such a complex safety critical system is designed using a high number of interacting safety elements that have been designed out of context of the target system by a multitude of suppliers. The paper details the complexities of the integration task. It argues in favour of introducing additional error containment boundaries and safety mechanisms to help manage the integration complexity.