Exploiting Mobile Agents for Structured Distributed Software-Implemented Fault Injection

Embedded distributed real-time systems are traditionally used in safety-critical application areas such as avionics, healthcare, and the automotive sector. Assuring dependability under faulty conditions by means of fault tolerance mechanisms is a major concern in safety-critical systems. From a validation perspective, Software-Implemented Fault Injection (SWIFI) is an approved means for testing fault tolerance mechanisms. In recent work, we have introduced the concept of using mobile agents for distributed SWIFI in time-driven real-time systems. This paper presents a prototypical implementation of the agent platform for the OSEKtime real-time operating system and the FlexRay communication system. It is further shown, how to implement fault injection experiments by means of mobile agents in a structured manner following a classification of faults in terms of domain, persistence, and perception. Based on experiments conducted on ARM-based platforms, selected results are described in detail to demonstrate the potential of mobile agent based fault injection.