Ricardo played an important role in ensuring compliance with safety standards and in overall project management for the European Truck Platooning Challenge EcoTwin project, which is currently underway and finishes in June 2016. The project involves various brands of automated trucks driving in platoons on public highways from several European cities to the Netherlands. Ricardo is participating alongside DAF Trucks, TNO and NXP.
The company used a range of functional safety standards considered to be the most relevant for autonomous transport systems. These included: ISO 26262 (Road vehicles – Functional safety); CENELEC standards; EN 50126 (The Specification and Demonstration of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety); EN 50128 (Communications, signalling and processing systems. Software for railway control and protection systems); and EN 50129 (Communications, signalling and processing systems. Safety related electronic systems for signalling).
Based upon these existing standards, Ricardo outlined and supported the safety approach for the EcoTwin project, and analyzed the risks and failure modes and compiled the evidence of the safe application of driverless solutions.
In addition, Ricardo managed the complete project on behalf of TNO, which included team building for all four partners, and coordination of the planning, progress and communications.
April 19, 2016