ASFIT: AUTOSAR-Based Software Fault Injection Test for Vehicles

Jihyun Park,Byoungju Choi

doi:10.3390/electronics9050850

Abstract

With recent increases in the amount of software installed in vehicles, the probability of automotive software faults that lead to accidents has also increased. Because automotive software faults can lead to serious accidents or even mortalities, vehicle software design and testing must consider safety a top priority. ISO 26262 recommends fault injection testing as a measure to verify the functional safety of vehicles. However, the standard does not clearly specify when and where faults should be injected, and the tools to support fault injection testing for automotive software are also insufficient. In the present study, we define faults that may occur in Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR)-based automotive software and propose a fault injection method to be applied during the software development process. The proposed method can inject different types of faults that may occur in AUTOSAR-based automotive software, such as access, asymmetric, and timing errors, while minimizing performance degradation due to fault injection, and without using any separate hardware devices. The superior performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through empirical studies applied to fault injection testing of a range of vehicle electronic control unit software.

Highlights

Automobiles have been embedded with many electronic control systems, which are connected to and interact with a network to exchange data
As the amount of software installed in vehicles and the importance of safety continue to increase, a practical software fault injection test method has become necessary to verify the functional safety of software during the development process of automotive electronics-embedded software
We propose a fault injection method to be applied during the electronic control unit (ECU) software is a standard platform for automotive software, created to improve automotive software development process, based on Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) [5]

Summary

Introduction

Automobiles have been embedded with many electronic control systems, which are connected to and interact with a network to exchange data. ISO 26262, the international standard for the functional safety of road vehicles, recommends fault injection testing as a measure to verify functional safety [2]. Fault injection testing has been used to verify the fault tolerance of hardware or software [3]. As the amount of software installed in vehicles and the importance of safety continue to increase, a practical software fault injection test method has become necessary to verify the functional safety of software during the development process of automotive electronics-embedded software (hereinafter referred to as “automotive software”). This section introduces the existing research on fault injection testing and software fault types. This section introduces the existing research on fault injection testing and software fault types applicable to AUTOSAR-based automotive software.

Methods

Results

Conclusion