Towards runtime testing in automotive embedded systems

Runtime testing is a common way to detect faults during normal system operation. To achieve a specific diagnostic coverage runtime testing is also used in safety critical, automotive embedded systems. In this paper we propose a test architecture to consolidate the hardware resource consumption and timing needs of runtime tests and of application and system tasks in a hard real-time embedded system as applied to the automotive domain. Special emphasis is put to timing requirements of embedded systems with respect to hard real-time and concurrent hardware resource accesses of runtime tests and tasks running on the target system.