Automotive Functional Safety Services

Contributing to automotive safety standards

We help bring clarity to functional safety process, assessment and compliance. Our long history in advising, evaluating and certifying the functional safety aspects of products and systems across many industries enables us to help you successfully address functional safety challenges.

We serve the automotive functional safety community by actively participating in automotive standards writing for electric vehicles (EV), electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE), safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF), cybersecurity and autonomous vehicles. We are active contributing members to the development of ISO 26262, ISO 21448, SAE 3016, SAE 3061 and UL 4600, the Standard for Safety for the Evaluation of Autonomous Products. We can also assess to other related functional safety standards. 

For us, compliance is not only a matter of satisfying a standard but of providing a real benefit to you in the areas of safety, general quality and development efficiency. Our automotive Functional Safety Team knows the nuances between different functional safety standards. And more importantly, our team has a firm grasp on the fundamental principles and concepts of functional safety across all industries and domains. This broad expertise proves critical when developing control systems for safety-related applications as vehicles become more interconnected with numerous external devices, networks and systems.

Automotive functional safety services we offer

Our functional safety offerings for the automotive industry include:

• Assessment and implementation guidance for functional safety management systems. Integration in existing systems, compliance with ISO/TS 16949, Automotive Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination (SPICE), ISO 15504, capability maturity models (CMM) as required
• Safety case construction, including work item templates, documentation structures, traceability, activity planning and product life cycle management (PLM) integration
• Tool qualification
• Confirmation measures and verification reviews
• Safety analysis throughout the product or system life cycle, at all levels — system, hardware and, in particular, software
• Risk methodologies and tools including but not limited to hazard analysis and risk assessment (HARA), hazard and operability analysis (HazOp), failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis (FTA), system-theoretic accident model and processes (STAMP), Markov, reliability block diagram (RBD), reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS), and static code analysis
• ISO 26262 compliance and certification, including development of concepts and architectures on the system/hardware level and on the software level to satisfy requirements for automotive safety integrity level (ASIL) decomposition, redundancy, independence, noninterference and diagnostic coverage
• Hardware quantification that includes reliability prediction and modeling, determination of diagnostic coverage, failure modes effects and diagnostic analysis (FMEDA) templates and calculation of metrics such as probability metric for random hardware failure (PMHF), single-point fault metric (SPFM) and latent fault metric (LFM)
• Increased environmental immunity design and testing including audits and training
• Functional safety assessments including advisory services such as preliminary reviews, mock audits and risk assessments
• Cybersecurity services including advisory services, threat assessments, testing and evaluations

Assessment services for automotive functional safety

In addition to training and independent reviews, we offer assessment services including:

• Items, systems, Safety Elements out of Context (SEooC) for compliance to ISO 26262
• Organizational and project-based functional safety management audits
• Autonomous vehicles and related systems
  • Vehicle level testing
  • ADAS, powertrain and other related control systems
  • Sensor fusion concepts and individual sensor certification
  • UL 4600 and highly automated vehicle (HAV) testing guideline verifications

Related automotive functional safety training and personnel certification programs

We also offer our personnel certification programs in automotive, semiconductor spaces as well as automotive cybersecurity. This includes our: 

• UL Certified Functional Safety Professional (UL-CFSP) 
• UL Certified Functional Safety eXpert (UL-CFSX

We also offer tailored and customized training based on software safety, cybersecurity, risk assessment, FMEDA calculations and other related subjects. Our training and personnel certification programs can be found on our knowledge solutions training center. See also our training partner: kVA by UL Solutions.