Specification and Design Considerations for Reliable Embedded Systems

The objective of this paper is to introduce a novel representation as a means to consider both permanent and temporal errors in order to increase the overall reliability of an embedded system. The deployment of embedded systems in safety critical applications, e.g. in the automotive domain, demands that the fundamental set of design criteria consisting of functionality, timeliness, and production costs be extended to consider of reliability as an optimization criterion. Thus reliability engineering becomes part of the overall design flow for embedded systems. The proposed approach is based on the introduction of permanent/transient error decision diagrams and on dedicated algorithms for the generation of system implementation sets which feature maximum reliability at minimal costs in terms of redundant resources. The proposed approach is demonstrated for a control system taken from the automotive domain.