Codesign and Simulated Fault Injection of Safety-Critical Embedded Systems Using SystemC

The international safety standard IEC-61508 highly recommends fault injection techniques in all steps of the development process of safety-critical embedded systems, in order to analyze the reaction of the system in a faulty environment and to validate the correct implementation of fault tolerance mechanisms. Simulated fault injection enables an early dependability assessment that reduces the risk of late discovery of safety related design pitfalls and enables the analysis of fault tolerance mechanisms at each design refinement step using techniques such as failure mode and effect analysis. This paper presents a SystemC based executable modeling approach for the codesign and early dependability assessment by means of simulated fault injection of safety-critical embedded systems, which reduces the gap between the abstractions at which the system is designed and assessed. The effectiveness of this approach is examined in a train on-board safety-critical odometry example, which combines fault tolerance and sensor-fusion.