Modeling and simulation of safety-critical automotive systems

A recent trend in the automotive industry is the introduction of ´x-by-wire´ technologies, for example steer- and brake-by-wire, in order to replace purely mechanical systems with electromechanical ones. Clearly, such systems have to operate safely under any circumstances in order to not endanger the passengers and the environment of x-by-wire equipped vehicles. To be able to measure qualitative aspects of x-by-wire systems at the abstract level of architecture, this article introduces a class of timed Petri-Nets which allows for the modeling and simulation of such systems. With the help of a brake-by-wire example, it is shown how aspects like robustness and fault-tolerance can be measured.