Automotive Software Certification: Current Status and Challenges

Modern vehicles can have millions of lines of software, for vehicle control, infotainment, etc. The correctness and quality of the software play a key role in the safety of whole vehicles. In order to assure the safety, engineers give an effort to prove correctness of individual subsystems or their integration using testing or verification methods. One needs to eventually certify that the developed vehicle as a whole is indeed safe using the artifacts and evidences produced throughout the development cycle. Such a certification process helps to increase the safety confidence of the developed software and reduce OEM's liability. However, software certification in automotive domain is not yet well established, compared to other safety-critical domains, such as avionics and medical devices. At the same time, safety-relevant standards and techniques, including ISO 26262 and assurance cases, have been well adopted. It finally promotes the adoption and development of software certification in the automotive industry. In this paper, we first present a survey of recent research in the domains of aviation, medical devices, and railway systems. After this survey, we summarize current status as well as existing challenges in the automotive software certification. Assurance cases are also presented as a promising technique to automotive software certification.