Functional Safety Analysis for Infrastructure-Enabled Depot Autonomy System
This addresses safety challenges for autonomous vehicle operations in controlled depot environments, offering a phased deployment approach, but it is incremental as it applies existing ISO 26262 methodology to a new system.
The paper tackled the functional safety analysis of an Infrastructure-Enabled Depot Autonomy system for automating vehicle marshalling in depots, identifying hazardous events and assigning safety levels (ASILs from QM to C) with high-speed operation requiring the most stringent safety requirements.
This paper presents the functional safety analysis for an Infrastructure-Enabled Depot Autonomy (IX-DA) system. The IX-DA system automates the marshalling of delivery vehicles within a controlled depot environment, navigating connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) between drop-off zones, service stations (washing, calibration, charging, loading), and pick-up zones without human intervention. We describe the system architecture comprising three principal subsystems -- the connected autonomous vehicle, the infrastructure sensing and compute layer, and the human operator interface -- and derive their functional requirements. Using ISO 26262-compliant Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA) methodology, we identify eight hazardous events, evaluate them across different operating scenarios, and assign Automotive Safety Integrity Levels~(ASILs) ranging from Quality Management (QM) to ASIL C. Six safety goals are derived and allocated to vehicle and infrastructure subsystems. The analysis demonstrates that high-speed uncontrolled operation imposes the most demanding safety requirements (ASIL C), while controlled low-speed operation reduces most goals to QM, offering a practical pathway for phased deployment.