Toward a Harmonized Approach -- Requirement-based Structuring of a Safety Assurance Argumentation for Automated Vehicles

Abstract: Despite increasing testing operation on public roads, media reports on incidents show that safety issues remain to this day. One major cause factoring into this circumstance is high development uncertainty that manufacturers face when deploying these systems in an open context. In particular, one challenge is establishing a valid argument at design time that the vehicle will exhibit reasonable residual risk when operating in its intended operational design domain. Regulations, such as the European Implementing Regulation 2022/1426, require manufacturers to provide a safety assurance argumentation for SAE-Level-4 automated vehicles. While there is extensive literature on assurance cases for safety-critical systems, the domain of automated driving lacks explicit requirements regarding the creation of safety assurance argumentations. In this paper, we aim to narrow this gap by elaborating a requirement-based approach. We derive structural requirements for an argumentation from literature and supplement these with requirements derived from stakeholder concerns. We implement the requirements, yielding a proposal for an overall argumentation structure. The resulting "safety arguments" argue over four topic complexes: The developed product, the underlying process including its conformance/compliance to standards/laws, as well as the argumentations' context and soundness. Finally, we instantiate this structure with respect to domain-specific needs and principles.