An Optimization Approach for Automotive Systems Architecture Driven by Safety and Cost

Abstract

Safety critical systems are present, today, almost in every car. They ensure different functionalities such as braking, steering and airbag deployment etc… The failure of these systems could lead to hazardous situations. To ensure that the risk in these systems is reduced to an acceptable level, the automotive industry refers to ISO-26262. It is the functional safety standard for electrical and electronic systems in road vehicles. It focuses on the requirements, processes and methods to deal with the ef fects of systematic failures and unsystematic hardware failures. Reaching a compliant design is, often, challenging particularly for high safety constraints systems. It has been also noted that, sometimes, due to safety constraints a design could lead to a cost derive. Ensuring that the design remains competitive in terms of cost is vital. With the growing complexity in funct ionalities and in size, the system design cycle can benefit from an approach that can help the designers make the best architectural choices to reach an optimal design. In this paper, we propose an approach for system design architecture optimization driven by the safety and cost constraints. It consists of an architecture synthesis and mapping approach that takes into account the safety constraints in the ISO 26262 context. It allows, at one hand, to reach a system preliminary architecture by choosing the best component that reduce the overall cost. On the other hand, it leads to a mapping that respects the safety constraints related to safety levels or to dependant failures.