Functional Safety of Component-based Embedded Control Systems

Abstract

This paper deals with the development of Safe Heterogeneous Embedded Control Systems following different component-based technologies used today in industry to reduce their time to market. To cover these technologies, we define a “Control Component” as an event-triggered software unit supporting different control functionalities. To guarantee a functional safety of the system, we define an agent-based architecture where the agent controls the environment evolution and applies automatic reconfigurations when hardware errors occur at run-time. We model the whole architecture according to the formalism Net Condition/Event Systems (abbr. NCES), and apply the model checker SES A to verify properties described according to the Computation Tree Logic (abbr. CTL). Our purpose is to check that whenever an error occurs at run-time, the agent behaves as described in user requirements by activating control components and deactivating others in order to guarantee a functional safety of the whole system. A Benchmark Production System is used as a running example to explain our contribution.