Toward a Safety Argumentation Lifecycle for Automated Vehicles: Promoting Communication and Interdependency with System Lifecycle Processes

TL;DR

This paper presents a requirements-driven safety argumentation lifecycle for automated vehicles, arguing that safety assurance must be treated as an evolving, bidirectional process tightly integrated with the system lifecycle. It introduces Baselining, Evolution, and Conservation as the core phases and emphasizes representation-supported communication to tailor evidence-based safety arguments to diverse stakeholders. By tying argumentation activity to system lifecycle phases and runtime monitoring, the approach enables ongoing risk management, informed decision-making, and proactive process refinement. The work highlights gaps in current literature on ex ante risk communication and provides a concrete framework for integrating communication representations (internal releases, external safety reports, and conformity cases) within the lifecycle, aiming to improve transparency, regulatory alignment, and public acceptance.

Abstract

Despite the growing number of automated vehicles on public roads, operating such systems in open contexts will inevitably involve incidents. This results from an inherent risk in road traffic, which arises from multiple sources of complexity and can never be fully eliminated. One central challenge lies in developing a defensible case that the residual risk has been reduced to a reasonable level. While a safety argumentation is a common means to represent this case, there is a need to guide its creation and maintenance by adequate processes. In this paper, we derive requirements for a safety argumentation lifecycle based on examining the current state of the art. In particular, the requirement-driven process design accounts for both identified limitations of current process specifications and implicit knowledge contained in related work. Subsequently, we reflect on interdependencies between the resulting safety argumentation lifecycle and the system lifecycle. Moreover, we discuss a gap in literature regarding transparent ex ante risk communication. Correspondingly, we introduce the concept of representation-supported communication that is based on deriving representations from the argumentation with respect to target stakeholders and communication purposes. Finally, we demonstrate how this approach can be integrated into the system lifecycle to facilitate stakeholder communication.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Safety argumentation lifecycle proposed in this paper. Central process phases are the baselining, the evolution through multiple argumentation revisions, and the conservation of the argumentation. As an example for an argumentation framework, the implementation of structural requirements for safety argumentations of automated vehicles detailed in loba_2025 is illustrated in the baselining box.
• Figure 2:
• Figure 3: Illustration of mutual influence of both lifecycles with respect to evidence-based argumentation population (green) as well as argumentation-based process refinement (yellow).
• Figure 4: Conceptualization of "representation-supported communication."
• Figure 5: Illustration of the interdependency of both lifecycles in terms of representation-supported communication. Indicated by red color are release-specific tasks that relate to the triggering and provision of release documents.