Fault Tree Analysis for the Design Exploration of Fault Tolerant Automotive Architectures

The increasing role of electronics in automotive systems drives the design of fault tolerant architectures. We envision that tool-based automated analysis of such applications will be increasingly necessary for system designers. In this work, we describe a tool flow to support design space exploration of fault tolerant automotive architectures. Within the flow, we describe and apply a self-designed tool that automatically generates a fault tree from a model of an industrial-sized, safety critical automotive control application. The model represents a deployment containing a set of functions that are mapped to a given set of architecture components. The functions implement data acquisition from sensor devices, perform fault management tasks, compute a control law, and issue commands to the actuators. The architecture component abstractions and modeling artifacts include a set of communication links and electronic control units (ECUs) that are distributed throughout the vehicle. In applying our fault tree generation tool, the results of this case study show the implications of an automatic fault tree generation approach in support of design space exploration of fault tolerant architectures.