Safety has been always been an important part, irrespective of the field of work that it accounts for. The functional safety standard that is currently being used in the automotive domain is the ISO 26262. This is an adaptation of the IEC 61508 safety standard. It is directed as a basic functional safety standard for a variety of industries. The version of ISO 26262 that is used in this thesis is the final draft released in January, 2011. In this thesis, various parts of the ISO 26262 functional safety standard are considered in order to understand the differences and interdependencies between them. The parts of ISO 26262 that are treated are as follows; Part 1: Vocabulary, Part 3: Concept phase, Part 4: Product development at the system level, Part 6: Product development at the software level and Part 9: Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL)-oriented and safety-oriented analysis. During the entire course of this thesis the ISO 26262 standard is evaluated and the experience gained from it is jotted down. The understanding gained during this thesis about the ISO 26262 can be applied to ongoing or new development processes. As safety can never be overlooked, the wisdom that belongs to the ISO 26262 can be generously used into embedded systems that demand certain levels of safety.

Safety has been always been an important part, irrespective of the field of work that it accounts for. The functional safety standard that is currently being used in the automotive domain is the ISO 26262. This is an adaptation of the IEC 61508 safety standard. It is directed as a basic functional safety standard for a variety of industries. The version of ISO 26262 that is used in this thesis is the final draft released in January, 2011. In this thesis, various parts of the ISO 26262 functional safety standard are considered in order to understand the differences and interdependencies between them. The parts of ISO 26262 that are treated are as follows; Part 1: Vocabulary, Part 3: Concept phase, Part 4: Product development at the system level, Part 6: Product development at the software level and Part 9: Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL)-oriented and safety-oriented analysis. During the entire course of this thesis the ISO 26262 standard is evaluated and the experience gained from it is jotted down. The understanding gained during this thesis about the ISO 26262 can be applied to ongoing or new development processes. As safety can never be overlooked, the wisdom that belongs to the ISO 26262 can be generously used into embedded systems that demand certain levels of safety.

Yes / ISO 26262, titled Road Vehicles–Functional Safety, is the new automotive functional safety standard for passenger vehicle industry. In order to accomplish the goal of designing and developing dependable automotive systems, ISO 26262 uses the concept of Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASILs), the adaptation of Safety Integrity Levels. ASILs are allocated to the components and subsystems that can cause system failure and malfunctions that lead to hazards. ASILs allocation is a hard problem consists of finding the optimal allocation of safety levels to the system architecture which must guarantee that the highest safety requirements are met while development cost of the automotive system is kept minimum. There were many successful attempts to solve this problem using different techniques. However, it is worth pointing out that there is an absence of a review that provides an in-depth study of all the existing methods and highlights their merits and demerits. This paper presents an overview of different approaches that were used to solve ASILs allocation problem. The review provides an overview of safety requirements including the related standards followed by a study of the resolution methods of the existing approaches. The study of each approach provides a detailed explanation of the used methodology and a discussion of its strength and weaknesses including the main open challenges.