Hardware-in-the-loop-based dependability analysis of automotive systems

Automotive systems embed several electronic control units whose purpose is to help drivers in controlling vehicles, as well as guaranteeing the safety of vehicles´ occupants. The occurrence of faults affecting these units can have dramatic impacts, and must be forecasted as earlier as possible during the conception of new vehicles. In this paper we propose a new fault-injection system based on a hardware-in-the-loop vehicle model. The main novelty of our system is the possibility of directly relating fault effects to vehicle´s dynamic response without performing long and expensive experiments on a prototype running on a test track