Modeling and Simulated Fault Injection for Time-Triggered Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

The development and certification of safety critical embedded systems require the implementation of fault-tolerance mechanisms to ensure the safe operation of the system even in the presence of faults. These mechanisms need to be verified and validated by means of fault injection. Simulated fault injection enables an early dependability assessment that validates the correct implementation of fault-tolerance mechanisms and reduces the risk of late and expensive discovery of safety related pitfalls. This paper presents a novel modeling and simulation framework for time-triggered safety critical embedded systems. Our approach supports simulated fault injection at different abstraction levels (platform independent and platform specific models) and integrates a time-triggered automatic test executor for the early verification and validation of the systems. The feasibility of the proposed framework is illustrated with a case study where a simplified railway signaling system is modeled and simulated at different levels of abstraction.