Low Level Bus Traffic Replay for the Test of Time-Triggered Communication Systems

Correct system operation, especially in a safety-critical environment, is all the more important since the consequences in case of failure might be catastrophic. This is particularly true for automotive electronics, which are building complex distributed systems comprising more than 70 electronic control units. In such a context, systematic test operation urgently requires the capability to repeat a given scenario in order (a) to track down the root of a failure (cyclic debugging) or (b) to apply a given - standardized -test pattern for validation or benchmarking. However, deterministic re-execution of a given scenario is difficult to achieve due to the large number of inputs and the concurrent process execution. The focus of our ExTraCT project is set to the communication network due to its central role in distributed systems. More especially, it is the aim of this paper to present a novel approach for the deterministic replay of network bus traffic in case of time-triggered communication protocols such as FlexRay (Mores et al., 2001). This low level replay aims at emulating parts of the system, thus decreasing the test complexity with respect to reproducibility