Reliability assessment of safety-relevant automotive systems in a model-based design flow

To support the reliability assessment of safety-relevant distributed automotive systems and reduce its complexity, this paper presents a novel approach that extends virtual prototyping towards error effect simulation. Besides the common functional and timed system simulation, error injection is used to stress error tolerance mechanisms. A quantitative assessment of the overall system reliability is performed by observing the system reactions and identifying incorrect system behavior. To foster the industrial application, the analysis is integrated in a model-based design flow, starting at the modeling level to assemble and parameterize the virtual prototype and to configure the analysis. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by analyzing a representative safety-relevant automotive use case.