UL 4600 (evaluation of autonomous products)

What it is

UL Standards & Engagement lists UL 4600, Standard for Evaluation of Autonomous Products, with a published date of 17 March 2023 and ANSI approval the same day.

The public scope says the standard covers the safety principles, risk mitigation, tools, techniques, and lifecycle processes for building and evaluating a safety argument for vehicles that can operate in an autonomous mode, whether the item is individual or part of a team such as a platoon.

Operation is assumed to occur without human supervision and without expectation of human intervention in performing and supervising the dynamic driving task and other normal system operations. UL Solutions describes ANSI/UL 4600 as addressing safety principles and processes for evaluating fully autonomous products requiring no human driver supervision using a safety case approach.

The March 2023 edition’s public change list includes a revised safety case framework to support Autonomous Trucking, a more precise definition for one preferred form of Safety Performance Indicator (SPI), and requirements concerning post-incident behaviors.

What it does not cover

The public scope is explicit about limits:

• The extent to which human operators mitigate or introduce risk by performing or supervising a dynamic control task is outside the scope. Issues involving human driver responsibilities, vigilance, and ability to properly accept responsibility for vehicle control are out of scope.
• The details of [information security] are out of scope … beyond a general requirement for a Security Plan.
• The requirements are at a necessary, but possibly not sufficient, level of completeness and rigor for an acceptably complete item safety case. Prompt lists are non-exhaustive.

UL 4600 is not an aviation standard and not ISO/IEC TR 5469. We have not found an official page that adopts UL 4600 as a means of compliance for aircraft, rail signalling, or medical devices, so we make no such claim. See the TR 5469 explainer.

Automotive

UL Solutions lists UL 4600 next to ISO 26262 and ISO 21448 as safety standards for autonomous vehicles. ISO 26262-1 is intended to be applied to safety-related systems that include one or more electrical and/or electronic (E/E) systems and that are installed in series production road vehicles, excluding mopeds. That is automotive functional safety for malfunctioning E/E behaviour, not a general AI-management standard. See the automotive industry page.

UL 4600 itself is scoped to autonomous vehicles. Rail and nuclear remain context on the safety-critical page.

Primary sources

Read the UL Standards catalog page. UL sells the full text.