Ricardo Launches New Software to Improve Vehicle Safety

SOREHAM-BY-SEA, UNITED KINGDOM - October 21, 2008: Ricardo today announced the launch of AutoFMEATM (Failure Mode Effects Analysis), an engineering analysis tool designed to help ensure the safety and reliability of increasingly complex automotive systems and controls. Ricardo unveiled AutoFMEATM at the SAE Convergence Transportation Electronics Conference, underway in Detroit until October 22.

Until now, safety and reliability analysis has largely been an expensive and time-consuming manual process. Lengthy reviews were required at each design stage to reduce errors to an acceptable level. Propagating the safety analysis from stage to stage was difficult, requiring significant work to update the manual safety analysis when changes occur. AutoFMEATM automates safety and reliability analysis through a model-based design approach that integrates tools for safety analysis and functional design, enabling engineers to incorporate safety and reliability during the specification and early design stages. The system performs a safety analysis at each stage of the design cycle and verifies that safety functions operate properly.

“Vehicle systems are becoming increasingly complex. One of the most critical challenges engineers face is ensuring the safety and reliability of those systems,” said Tom Robinson, Ricardo’s Senior Product Group Manager, Controls and Electronics. The advance of vehicle electrification is moving us toward sophisticated systems such as steer-by-wire, in which the mechanical linkage between the steering wheel and the road wheels is replaced with sensors and electric motors. Obviously, a failure in this system could be catastrophic. AutoFMEATM highlights hazards that can occur given certain scenarios and faults, then assesses the impact of multiple faults occurring simultaneously. This allows engineers to focus on the real issue of analyzing potential failure mechanisms during every stage of the design process, leading to safer and more reliable systems. And because the analysis is embedded into the design process, considerable savings in time and cost are possible.”

AutoFMEATM is a powerful add-on to widely used MATLAB Simulink. It facilitates safety analysis within the same environment used for design engineering. It can be applied to any system that can be modeled with Simulink. AutoFMEATM uses Markov analysis to determine the probability of defined hazards occurring based on user-defined failure rates.