Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy

Safety systems engineering in autonomy is the discipline concerned with providing rigorous, verifiable guarantees that complex automated systems — in cars, aircraft, and medical devices — will behave safely even under unexpected conditions. It draws on structured methodologies such as ISO 26262 for automotive functional safety, assurance cases that formally argue why a system meets its safety goals, and model-based development practices that let engineers analyze hazards before a single line of production code is written. As automated systems grow more capable and software-intensive, the field faces hard open questions about how to certify components built on machine learning, where traditional techniques for tracing failures through deterministic logic break down. Active research directions include developing new risk assessment frameworks that account for emergent behavior in autonomous systems and extending security assurance methods to address the growing overlap between safety and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

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27,270

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69,602

Keywords

Safety AssuranceAssurance CasesSoftware CertificationFunctional SafetyAutomotive SPICEModel-Based Development