Fault-injection for Hardware- and Software-in-the-Loop testing of networked railway systems

Abstract

Verification is an important step during the development process of safety-critical railway applications. Verifying the functionality already at early development stages can prevent integration issues in later steps. Hence, typically used technologies are Hardware- and Software-in-the-Loop testing, co-simulation and fault-injection. The latter is a good opportunity to inject faults deterministically into hardware, software or simulation models of a device. In this way, the functionality of the network and end devices can be validated effectively in cases of errors.In this paper we extend an existing framework for distributed co-simulation by the means of fault-injection. Our mechanism is based on the CENELEC EN 50159 standard which defines seven message errors for communication. As the framework operates on a network-centric abstraction level, we inject the faults directly into the packets. The evaluation shows the applicability of our fault-injection mechanism for Hardware- and Software-in-the-Loop testing based on an example application.