Towards a DECOS Fault Injection Platform for Time-Triggered Systems

This paper presents a fault injection platform targeting the communication bus in the DECOS platform, which is using a time-triggered communication protocol such as TTP or FlexRay. Communication errors are injected by a disturbance node, which emulates errors caused by external sources, e.g. from electrical relays in road vehicles or from lightning affecting airplanes. The platform is flexible and the communication protocol can be reconfigured from TTP to FlexRay or vice versa. The experiments are configured by XML scripts and controlled by Lauterbach TRACE32 software and hardware. Raw data from the experiments are stored in SRAM memory without halting the program execution so only minor time intrusiveness is introduced for logging data. After each experiment raw data are downloaded from memory, automatically parsed and converted into integer and e.g. float data types, and finally stored in a MySQL database for analysis. Several analysis functions are developed to evaluate the effectiveness of hardware-implemented and software-implemented error detection and recovery mechanisms.