A Simulated Fault Injection Framework for Time-Triggered Safety-Critical Embedded Systems (original) (raw)

This paper presents a testing and simulated fault injection framework for time-triggered safety-critical embedded systems. Our ap-proach facilitates the validation of fault-tolerance mechanisms by per-forming non-intrusive Simulated Fault Injection (SFI) on models of the system at different stages of the development, from the Platform Inde-pendent Model (PIM) to the Platform Specific Model (PSM). The SFI enables exercising the intended fault tolerance mechanisms by injecting faults in a simulated model of a system. The main benefit of this work is that it enables an early detection of design flaws in fault-tolerant sys-tems, what reduces the possibility of late discovery of design pitfalls that might require an expensive redesign of the system. We examine the fea-sibility of the proposed approach in a case study, where SFI is used to assess the fault tolerance mechanisms designed in a simplified railway signaling system.