Safety is an integral part of the design process in many industrial applications, ranging from chemical to nuclear plant, from transport to pharmaceutical sector. The introduction of driving automation in the automotive sector brought new challenges for both industry and government in order to ensure automated vehicles are safe.
The European Commission (EC) Joint Research Centre (JRC) is supporting the Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW) with pre-normative research on new assessment and tests methods for automated vehicles (AVs) safety certification that take into account auditing approaches as well as different levels of testing (simulation, track- and on-road tests) and feedback from the operational experience.
Other industrial domains, like the railway sector, already faced the introduction of automation of cyber-physical systems and developed robust and sound methodologies for the certification of safety management systems and for product approval. In this context, a joint online-workshop was organized between JRC and the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) in order to investigate possible application of approaches and best practices developed for the certification of railway systems to the approval of automated vehicles, and to identify areas of common interest for future collaboration.
Many analogies were found between challenges already addressed for certification of railway systems and those still pending for AVs approval. Namely, the Safety Management System certification and monitoring, maintenance requirements, infrastructure-vehicle system certification, are the areas where lessons learned from railway transport could represent a useful inspiration for the automotive sector. Further to that, in-service safety through the operational feedback was identified as are of common interest for mutually beneficial future collaboration
