Fault Injection for Simulation of Electronic Control Units

For safety critical applications, the largest development cost lies in software and system test. Software Reliability as an engineering discipline needs to cover all common and corner test cases and thus imposes significant cost in creating fault scenarios and replaying these scenarios predictably and in a cost effective manner.

This paper discusses software reliability analysis using Virtual System Prototypes. Virtual System Prototypes (VSPs) are represented by simulation models of both the digital electronics as well as the environment, such as sensors, actuators and full plant models. Virtual System Prototypes provide easy mechanisms for exploring Software Reliability not achievable by other means.