COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF FAULT-TOLERANT HARDWARE ARCHITECTURES FOR AUTONOMOUS DRIVING SYSTEMS

Abstract

AbstractFault-tolerant hardware architectures for autonomous vehicles can be implemented through redundancy, diversity, separation, self-diagnosis, and reconfiguration. These approaches can be coupled with majority redundancy through M-out-of-N independent system architectures. The development of fault- tolerant systems is of central importance in the launch of autonomous driving systems from level 4. The increasing complexity of electrical and electronic systems is challenging for the design of safety-critical systems. This work aims to develop a method to manage this complexity in product development and to use it to compare different types of architectures. The basis is a system consisting of sensors and microcontrollers. The reliability of all possible MooN configurations of the system is calculated automatically by numerically solving the master equation of the corresponding Markov chain. Subsequently, a software-based fault tree analysis enables more detailed modeling of the component structure. The results show that four-line architectures can provide suitable results and that the development effort for 2-ECU systems is higher than for 1-ECU systems with respect to the ISO 26262 target values.