System-level analysis of fault effects in an automotive environment

In recent years, new requirements in terms of vehicle performance has increased significantly the amount of on-board electronics, thus raising more concern about safety and fault tolerance induced by the electronic system in automotive products. The adoption of several on board active systems and their interactions forced designers to substitute point to point connections with networking systems, mainly based on the controller area network (CAN) protocol. This paper presents some recent results to improve the evaluation of reliability due to network connections. Evaluation is based on first modeling the network at the functional level and then integrating it into a complete vehicle model describing both electronic and mechanical behavior; in this way, it is possible to build an automated fault injection environment to forecast the effects of faults at the network level on the vehicle dynamics. We evaluated this approach on the vehicle dynamic control subsystem, and analyzed the effects on vehicle performance in the presence of several network faults.