A Simulated Fault Injection Framework for Time-Triggered Safety-Critical Embedded Systems (original) (raw)
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Modeling and Simulated Fault Injection for Time-Triggered Safety-Critical Embedded Systems
The development and certification of safety critical embedded systems require the implementation of fault-tolerance mechanisms to ensure the safe operation of the system even in the presence of faults. These mechanisms need to be verified and validated by means of fault injection. Simulated fault injection enables an early dependability assessment that validates the correct implementation of fault-tolerance mechanisms and reduces the risk of late and expensive discovery of safety related pitfalls. This paper presents a novel modeling and simulation framework for time-triggered safety critical embedded systems. Our approach supports simulated fault injection at different abstraction levels (platform independent and platform specific models) and integrates a time-triggered automatic test executor for the early verification and validation of the systems. The feasibility of the proposed framework is illustrated with a case study where a simplified railway signaling system is modeled and...
The validation of fault-tolerance mechanisms in time-triggered dependable systems is usually carried out in the latest stages of the development process. As a consequence, fixing design faults found at late stages is very costly. Simulated Fault Injection (SFI) enables exercising the intended fault tolerance mechanisms by injecting faults in a simulated model of a system, which becomes a major benefit for designers since it reduces the risk of a late discovery of design flaws. This paper presents an integral modeling and simulation environment for dependable Time-Triggered HW/SW systems. Our approach facilitates the validation of fault-tolerance mechanisms by performing non-intrusive simulated fault injection on models of the system at different levels of abstraction, from the Platform Independent Model (PIM) to the Platform Specfic Model (PSM). We exemplify the feasibility of the proposed approach in a case study, where SFI is used to support the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (F...
A novel modeling framework for time-triggered safety-critical embedded systems
Proceedings of the 2014 Forum on Specification and Design Languages (FDL), 2014
This paper presents the Platform Specific Time Triggered Model (PS-TTM), a SystemC based modeling and simulation framework for time-triggered safety-critical embedded systems. The approach facilitates the modeling of Time-Triggered Architecture (TTA) based embedded systems, following a strict separation between the designs of functionality and platform. The PS-TTM provides a value and time domain deterministic simulation environment for an early functional and temporal assessment of the systems. Moreover, the framework includes a time-triggered automatic test executor that enables to perform non-intrusive simulated fault injection (SFI) to the models. The SFI makes an early dependability assessment possible, what reduces the risk of late and expensive discovery of safety related pitfalls. The feasibility of the proposed framework is illustrated with a case study, based on the modeling, simulation and validation of a simplified railway on-board signaling system.
Codesign and Simulated Fault Injection of Safety-Critical Embedded Systems Using SystemC
2010 European Dependable Computing Conference, 2010
The international safety standard IEC-61508 highly recommends fault injection techniques in all steps of the development process of safety-critical embedded systems, in order to analyze the reaction of the system in a faulty environment and to validate the correct implementation of fault tolerance mechanisms. Simulated fault injection enables an early dependability assessment that reduces the risk of late discovery of safety related design pitfalls and enables the analysis of fault tolerance mechanisms at each design refinement step using techniques such as failure mode and effect analysis.
On Enhancing Fault Injection's Capabilities and Performances for Safety Critical Systems
2014 17th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design, 2014
The increasing need for high-performance dependable systems with and the ongoing strong cost pressure leads to the adoption of commercial off-the-shelf devices, even for safety critical applications. Ad hoc techniques must be studied and implemented to develop robust systems and to validate the design against all safety requirements. Nonetheless, white-box fault injection relies on the deep knowledge of the system hardware architecture and it is seldom available to the designer. Furthermore it would require enormous simulation time to be carried out. This work presents an enhanced architecture for fast fault injection to be used for design-time coverage evaluation and runtime testing. A test case will be presented on Xilinx Zynq system on programmable chip, suitable for design-time diagnostic coverage evaluation and online testing for safety-critical systems resorting to the proposed fault injection methodology.
Sensors, 2022
A well-known challenge in the development of safety-critical systems in vehicles today is that reliability and safety assessment should be rigorously addressed and monitored. As a matter of fact, most safety problems caused by system failures can lead to serious hazards and loss of life. Notwithstanding the existence of several traditional analytical techniques used for evaluation based on specification documents, a complex design, with its multivariate dynamic behavior of automotive systems, requires an effective method for an experimental analysis of the system's response under abnormal conditions. Simulation-based fault injection (FI) is a recently developed approach to simulate the system behavior in the presence of faults at an early stage of system development. However, in order to analyze the behavior of the system accurately, comprehensively and realistically, the real-time conditions, as well as the dynamic system model of the vehicle, should be considered. In this stud...
FlexFi: A Flexible Fault Injection Environment for Microprocessor-Based Systems
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1999
Microprocessor-based embedded systems are increasingly used to control safetycritical systems (e.g., air and railway traffic control, nuclear plant control, aircraft and car control). In this case, fault tolerance mechanisms are introduced at the hardware and software level. Debugging and verifying the correct design and implementation of these mechanisms ask for effective environments, and Fault Injection represents a viable solution for their implementation. In this paper we present a Fault Injection environment, named FlexFI, suitable to assess the correctness of the design and implementation of the hardware and software mechanisms existing in embedded microprocessor-based systems, and to compute the fault coverage they provide. The paper describes and analyzes different solutions for implementing the most critical modules, which differ in terms of cost, speed, and intrusiveness in the original system behavior.
Development of Scenario-Based Fault Injection Platform and Its Application Study
Tamkang Journal of Science and Engineering
This paper presents a comprehensive fault-tolerant verification platform which can be used to characterize the impact of fault attribute on error coverage. The core of the verification platform is the scenario-based fault injection tool that can inject the transient and permanent faults into VHDL models of digital systems at chip, RTL and gate levels during the design phase. Weibull fault distribution is employed to decide the time instant of fault injection. A new feature of our tool is to offer users the statistical analysis of the injected faults. The statistical data for each injection campaign exhibit the degree of fault severity, which represents a fault scenario (or called fault environment). By varying the fault attributes, such as the fault duration or fault-occurring rate, we can produce a variety of fault scenarios for the fault simulations. Such simulations can reveal the error coverage of the fault-robust systems under various fault environments. Two case studies with experiments of fault injection were conducted to show how the fault attribute affects the error coverage.
Experimental validation of high-speed fault-tolerant systems using physical fault injection
1999
This paper introduces a new methodology for validation of dependable systems based on physical fault injection. The approach defines the elements of the injection environment and the requirements that are necessary to control the injection process with fine granularity, allowing for the elimination of glitches and not valid experiments and therefore making the validation process more accurate. We also show the main features of a high-speed pin level fault injection tool, AFIT (Advanced Fault Injection Tool), that incorporates most of the requirements necessary for the application of this methodology. As a practical case study we have validated FASST, a fault tolerant multiprocessor system composed of several fail-silent processor modules. The dependability of the system has been shown, including the influence of the error detection levels in the coverage and latency of the error.