Achieving Functional Safety with Polarion X

Why it matters

Functional Safety is a critical aspect of system design that ensures a system behaves correctly in response to its inputs—even when faults occur. It’s not just about preventing failures, but about managing them in a way that avoids hazardous outcomes. In industries like automotive, industrial automation, and medical devices, functional safety is essential to protect lives, reduce risks, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. As vehicles become more software-driven and complex, ensuring that safety-critical functions operate reliably under all conditions is more important than ever.

ISO 26262: The automotive safety standard

In the automotive domain, ISO 26262 is the internationally recognized standard for functional safety. It provides a structured framework for managing safety throughout the lifecycle of automotive systems—from concept to decommissioning. A key element of ISO 26262 is the Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), which identifies potential hazards and evaluates the associated risks based on severity, exposure, and controllability. This process leads to the assignment of an Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), which defines the necessary safety requirements and rigor for development. For OEMs and suppliers, compliance with ISO 26262 is not just a regulatory requirement—it’s a competitive advantage that demonstrates commitment to safety, reliability, and quality.

Polarion X for Automotive 2410: Functional Safety

Since several years, Polarion has offered solutions to manage HARA or Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) as standalone reports. With the release of Polarion X for Automotive in 2023, we introduced a comprehensive solution that delivers end-to-end workflows, live document templates, and ready-to-use metrics to support the entire safety lifecycle — from FMEA and HARA to Functional and Technical Safety Concepts, all the way through to Validation.

We’re excited to announce the next evolution of this solution: As part of the Polarion X for Automotive 2410 release, the usability of all reports has been significantly enhanced through the introduction of interactive analysis tables. See the HARA example below:

Let’s take a holistic view of our Functional Safety solution for ISO 26262:2018. The template includes predefined work items, workflows, and link roles — just to name a few key features. The schema below provides a brief overview of the data model, which serves as a starting point for users. Organizations can easily tailor this model to fit their specific needs.

To simplify the various phases of the safety lifecycle and manage large volumes of data, the template breaks the analysis into smaller steps, each focusing on specific aspects of the safety assessment. All activities take place in the context of a defined item or a set of components/functionalities. Specifically, users work on analyzing:

• FMEA
• HARA
• Technical Safety Concept
• Functional Safety Concept
• Safety Validation

Polarion’s linking technology enables users to trace the impact of a hazard down to the corresponding test case and its validation result — in real time and with baseline options. We believe that safety analysis is not a linear process. Therefore, our approach allows users to move iteratively between the different analysis tables without losing context. For example, you might start with FMEA, proceed to HARA, and then continue with the Functional Safety Concept. If you realize a failure mode was missed, you can simply jump back, add it, and continue the workflow seamlessly.

The solution not only provides interactive reports, but also includes checks and workflow automation. For example, the workflow automation can be used to calculate ASIL results after values for severity, occurrence, and exposure have been provided.

Furthermore, Polarion supports the analysis of Safety Goal breakdowns into Functional Safety Concepts by enabling ASIL decomposition validation, as defined in ISO 26262-9:2018. As illustrated below, this feature allows for instant validation of whether the Functional Safety Concept aligns with the corresponding Safety Goal.

Last but not least, we acknowledge that a typical safety analysis may contain hundreds of entries. Not all information is always relevant or needed in the order it is presented. Users can filter and sort data across all tables — see the example below for a failed validation result.

Curious to learn more?

If you are interested, please use test drive for the solution here. The link includes an in-app tutorial to make sure you are not missing anything.

To find out more on Polarion X for Automotive, visit our website here.

You can visit the Polarion X community here.

Polarion for Automotive is also available for on-premises users. See our extension portal for more information here.