Comparison of the Results of the System Theoretic Process Analysis for a Vehicle SAE Level four and five

Safety is a decisive factor during the development of automotive systems. Modern vehicles are becoming more software-intensive, electronic components are increasingly replacing mechanical units. This is accompanied by a further increase in the complexity of the systems. Mobility concepts could be subject to fundamental changes in the future. There is a broad consensus among safety and security experts that traditional methods alone can no longer guarantee adequate safeguarding of software-intensive systems. Faced with the problems that the fundamental changes in today’s designed systems require a need for new hazard analyses, Leveson developed the System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) in 2004. This paper shows how the STPA analysis can be used as a valuable tool to identify potential hazards. In this paper partial results of STPA for a vehicle SAE2 level five are presented and compared with the results of STPA, carried out for a vehicle SAE level four by the same authors. This paper has not yet been published but a draft version is available.2SAE as a definition of the automation levels as defined in the SAE J3016 standard.