In the strongly competitive worldwide market of today, a car manufacturer has to offer to its customersrelevant, innovative, reliable, environment friendly and safe services. All this must be done at verycompetitive costs while complying with more and more stringent regulations and tighter deadlines. Thiswork addresses these challenges and aims at improving the design process for automotive safety criticalmechatronics systems. It shows that the use of formal and informal models can commit to a commonsemantic model, i.e., a system and safety ontology, that enables to ensure the consistency of the wholedesign process and compliance with standard ISO 26262. The concepts in this work have been appliedon a regenerative hybrid braking system integrated into an electrical vehicle. It demonstrated that therealized ontology enables to record the information produced during design and that using ontologieseffectively enables to detect semantic inconsistencies which improves design information quality, promotesreuse and ensures ISO 26262 compliance.
