The Autonomous Working Group Safety & Architecture is pleased to announce the release of its second report, freshly published in September 2025 ahead of The Autonomous Main Event. This milestone builds on the first edition released in late 2023, which focused on conceptual system architecture for Highly Automated Driving (HAD) systems.
Over the past two years, members from OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, academia, and research institutes have advanced the group’s mission: to identify and evaluate high-level fail-operational system architectures for SAE Level 4 automated driving and higher. The result is a substantially expanded and refined report offering guidance to system owners and decision-makers on architectural choices, safety standards, and subsystem independence.
Importantly, both editions of the report were accompanied by external reviewers from both industry and academia, whose expert insights helped validate the methodology and strengthen the relevance of the findings.
Key Updates in the Second Edition:
- Three new candidate architectures added, bringing the total to eight, with more consistent and comparable descriptions.
- Expanded safety standards analysis – five additional standards reviewed (UNECE R157, ISO/IEC TR 5469, ISO/PAS 8800, UL 4600, and ISO/TS 5083), providing a comprehensive look at architectural impacts.
- Sufficient Independence methodology – new framework for analyzing subsystem coupling factors, including a semi-quantitative scheme (“Independence Coverage”) to evaluate whether sufficient independence has been achieved from both FuSa and SOTIF perspectives.
- Implementation considerations – new aspects added, including crypto agility for post-quantum cryptography.
- Improved consistency in terminology, diagram style, and depth of architecture descriptions.
This second edition reaffirms The Autonomous initiative’s commitment to advancing safety through collaboration, not competition. By aligning on architectural principles and methodologies, the Working Group aims to accelerate the safe and secure deployment of autonomous mobility worldwide.
Dive into the report to uncover these findings and strengthen your understanding of autonomous driving safety.
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Browse the report below, and if you wish, you can download the full version as a PDF.
