Instrumenting AUTOSAR for dependability assessment: A guidance framework

The AUTOSAR standard guides the development of component-based automotive software. As automotive software typically implements safety-critical functions, it needs to fulfill high dependability requirements, and the effort put into the quality assurance of these systems is correspondingly high. Testing, fault injection (FI), and other techniques are employed for the experimental dependability assessment of these increasingly software-intensive systems. Having flexible and automated support for instrumentation is key in making these assessment techniques efficient. However, providing a usable, customizable and performant instrumentation for AUTOSAR is non-trivial due to the varied abstractions and high complexity of these systems. This paper develops a dependability assessment guidance framework tailored towards AUTOSAR that helps identify the applicability and effectiveness of instrumentation techniques at (a) varied levels of software abstraction and granularity, (b) at varied software access levels - black-box, grey-box, white-box, and (c) the application of interface wrappers for conducting FI.