The automotive industry is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of Software-defined Vehicles (SdV) and central Electronic Control Units (ECUs), introducing unprecedented complexity within product development. The size of complex systems requires a close collaboration across organizational borders. The traditional waterfall concepts often get into conflict with the agile approaches used in the software domain. Adhering to traditional risk analysis approaches becomes challenging due to the rapid release cycles and continuous evolution of software-based products. For such products, AbRA as additional tool in toolbox for technical risk analysis, will have advantages compared to other approaches.

The proposed workflow describes a transfer of best practices from software engineering like package management, small iterations, and utilization of automated checks. This approach facilitates collaboration on a common model spanning multiple organizations without the need of exposing the IP. With a stable workflow ensuring the quality of contributions, we have a foundation to increase the group of contributors and bring aspects of the technical risk analysis into system and software architecture models.

We assume, that most models are covering the aspects of requirements, functional flow, structural decomposition, and the relations between these viewpoints. By extending this standard model with one meta-element «FailureMode», which is used to model cause-effect chains from the bottom-layer up to the violation of a safety requirement and relations to mitigation measures for preventing and controlling the failure modes, the safety analysis can be performed by the development team. By applying AbRA, the requirements of ISO26262 regarding inductive and deductive analysis can be fulfilled. Therefore, AbRA can be used for safety analysis up to ASIL-D. AbRA is simple and easy to learn, which allows to distribute the workload for the initial creation of the analysis to the team members. The role of moderators of risk analysis meetings shifts from moderating large sessions building up the risk analysis to coaching the team and challenging their content in reviews meetings.