Title: Standard for functional safety data format for interoperability within the dependability lifecycle

Purpose: The IEEE P2851 standardization initiative was started to define a dependability lifecycle as well as methods and formats for exchange/interoperability of data across all steps of the lifecycle in a consistent way. Additionally, the work products of this standardization initiative will help enable interoperability between tools. The goal of this work is to provide structures and directions to allow a seamless exchange of information and interoperability between activities at the same or different level of abstraction, as well as activities across lifecycles related to different dependability attributes across application domains such as automotive, industrial, medical and avionics safety critical systems.

Need for this project: The development of IPs and SoCs for safety critical applications is rapidly emerging due to the growth of applications such as automated driving or robotics. Standards such as ISO 26262 (automotive), IEC 61508 (industrial) and many others are requiring IP vendors and SoC providers in executing safety analyses (such as FMEA, FMEDA, FMECA, FTA) and related safety verification activities – such as fault injection – and deliver results to system integrators. EDA vendors are also starting to provide tools to automate those activities. However, at this time, there is not a common language or format to provide those results. In the end system integrators are struggling with many different types of data, so spending a huge amount of effort to reconsolidate, compare, integrate, combine the data. For that reason, the safety critical community is strongly asking for a solution to accelerate the safety engineering process while reducing risks and costs.

Scope: This standard defines a dependability lifecycle of products with focus on interoperable activities related to functional safety and its interactions with reliability, security, operational safety and time‐determinism. The standard defines methods, description languages, data models, and databases that have been identified as necessary or critical, to enable the exchange/interoperability of data across all steps of the lifecycle encompassing activities executed at IP, SoC, system and item levels, in a technology independent way across application domains such as automotive, industrial, medical and avionics safety critical systems, and to support developing methodologies such as Artificial Intelligence. The end goal of P2851 is to become a family of standards (P2851.1, .2, .3 etc) covering broader functional safety topics such as system- and SW-level safety analyses, formal/semi-formal representations of assumption of use, and also extending to adjacent domains such as cybersecurity analyses and related verification methodologies, providing structures and directions to allow a seamless exchange of information and interoperability between activities at the same or different level of abstraction, as well as activities across lifecycles related to different dependability attributes across application domains such as automotive, industrial, medical and avionics safety critical systems.

Relationship with Accellera Proposed Functional Safety WG: An Accellera Proposed Functional Safety WG was created to determine FS topics that Accellera was requested to explore. IEEE P2851 is an overall framework within which some of the pieces could be partially or fully developed through the Accellera FSWG and then transferred to P2851 to be part of a standard of P2851 sequence, or referenced by. This approach is similar to the successful methodology used to develop several of the standards developed under the DASC. These standards include, SystemC, SystemVerilog, UPF, UVM, IP-XACT and others. The P2851 WG is preparing a detailed description of the overall framework for the sequence of standards and related topics.

Note: This is an Entity based project and IEEE SA Corporate membership is required. Please review IEEE SA Corporate member list here to confirm if your company is a corporate member. Click here to learn more about IEEE SA Membership.