Trustworthy Evaluation of a Safe Driver Machine Interface through Software-Implemented Fault Injection

Experimental evaluation is aimed at providing useful insights and results that constitute a confident representation of the system under evaluation. Although guidelines and good practices exist and are often applied, the uncertainty of results and the quality of the measuring system is rarely discussed. To complement such guidelines and good practices in experimental evaluation, metrology principles can contribute in improving experimental evaluation activities by assessing the measuring systems and the results achieved. In this paper we present the experimental evaluation by software-implemented fault injection of a safe train-borne driver machine interface (DMI), to evaluate its behavior in presence of faults. The measuring system built for the purpose and the results obtained on the assessment of the DMI are scrutinized along basic principles of metrology and good practices of fault injection. Trustfulness in results has been estimated satisfactory and the experimental campaign has shown that the safety mechanisms of the DMI correctly identify the faults injected and that a proper reaction is executed.