Relating vehicle-level and network-level reliability through high-level fault injection

This paper presents some recent results to improve the evaluation of reliability due to network connections in automotive environments. Evaluation is based on the adoption of performance thresholds aiming at detecting performance loss at particular types of fault occurrence. For this activity we modeled the vehicle network at the functional level and then integrated it into a complete vehicle model describing both electronic and mechanical behavior; in this way, it is possible to build an automated fault injection environment to forecast the effects of faults at the network level on the vehicle dynamics. Furthermore, an on-line threshold manager permits to interrupt a single simulation when a fault activates an error threshold, reducing the overall campaign simulation time.