ANSI/UL 4600 - Standard for Safety for the Evaluation of Autonomous Products

ANSI/UL 4600 Standard for Safety for the Evaluation of Autonomous Products encompasses fully autonomous systems that move such as self-driving cars along with applications in mining, agriculture, maintenance, and other vehicles including lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It seeks to specifically address the ability of autonomous products to perform safely and as intended — without human intervention — based on their current state and sensing of the operating environment. Reliability of hardware and software necessary for machine learning, sensing of operating environment and other safety aspects of autonomy is also addressed. It is envisioned that future end-product standards will tailor UL 4600 to address specialized applications. 
The Standard uses a claim-based approach which prescribes topics that must be addressed in creating a safety case. It is intended to address changes required from traditional safety practices to accommodate autonomy, such as lack of human operator to take fault mitigation actions. Topics covered in the Standard include safety case construction, risk analysis, safety relevant aspects of design process, testing, tool qualification, autonomy validation, data integrity, human-machine interaction (for non-drivers), life cycle concerns, metrics and conformance assessment. Security is addressed as a requirement, but details are currently outside the scope of the proposed Standard. 
Conversely, UL 4600 does not cover performance criteria or define pass/fail criteria for safety; nor does it benchmark the road testing of prototype vehicles. The Standard does not set acceptable risk levels nor set forth requirements for ethical product release decisions and any ethical aspects of product behavior. UL 4600 remains technology neutral, meaning that it does not mandate the use of any specific technology in creating the autonomous system, and it also permits design process flexibility. Furthermore, it covers validation of any machine learning-based functionality and other autonomy functions used in life critical applications. Compliance with UL 4600 permits (but does not require conformance to) other safety standards such as ISO 26262, ISO/PAS 21448, IEC 61508, MIL STD 882, etc., as well as security standards where such conformity is demonstrated. © 2022 ULSE Inc.

The information about this standard has been compiled by the AI Standards Hub, an initiative dedicated to knowledge sharing, capacity building, research, and international collaboration in the field of AI standards. You can find more information and interactive community features related to this standard by visiting the Hub’s AI standards database here. To access the standard directly, please visit the developing organisation’s website.