Re-imagining ISO 26262 in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles: Enhancing Controllability through Transferability and Predictability
For safety engineers and regulators, this work offers a structured extension to existing functional safety standards to handle driverless systems, though it is an incremental refinement rather than a paradigm shift.
The paper addresses the inadequacy of ISO 26262's Controllability concept for autonomous vehicles by decomposing it into two measurable sub-concepts: Transferability and Predictability. It provides a mathematical framework to quantify these dimensions, enabling falsifiable and traceable fallback and interaction claims for SAE Levels 4 and 5.
The ISO 26262 standard defines functional safety for road vehicles through risk assessments based on Severity, Exposure, and Controllability, grounded in a human-driven vehicle paradigm. In the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the absence of a human driver necessitates revisiting these principles. This paper decomposes the Controllability placeholder into two auditable evidence dimensions of ISO 26262 by introducing two measurable sub-concepts: Transferability and Predictability. Transferability extends Controllability to capture AV systems' ability to hand off control to dedicated fallback safety mechanisms, while Predictability captures how easily external agents can anticipate AV behavior. Predictability is formally defined from human-robot interaction-inspired principles, and a mathematical framework is provided to quantify it. A designed-versus-achievable gap is introduced to distinguish architectural fallback claims from scene-conditioned achievable fallback capability. The proposed metrics align with ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS 21448 (SOTIF), rendering fallback and interaction claims falsifiable and traceable across ODD slices. These dimensions complement rather than replace existing standards, and the enhancements preserve the structure of ISO 26262 while extending its applicability to driverless automated systems operating at SAE Levels 4 and 5.