Next Generation of Fail-Safe Architectures and Components 2009-01-0737

To improve road safety the public sector is actively supporting this effort with investment in required infrastructure, enforcement in the road safety rules, and improved deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). With the development of more powerful processors, communication and sensor technologies, tools are now available to enable the industry players to meet the aforementioned challenges.

The paper will describe work undertaken within the European MEDEA+ framework in the project SAPECS (Secured Architecture & Protocols for Enhanced Car Safety). The consortium of companies that worked within SAPECS broke down the requirements emerging from these complex automotive architectures into component specifications, and partitioning of software/hardware to optimise costs. Governed by system dependability requirements, the electronics was analysed in terms of fault-tolerance, reliability, or failure mechanisms and is turned-out into specific fail-safety oriented specifications. Microcontroller architectures are investigated in a hierarchical ways, from the communication paths between the elements constituting the systems, to the benefit and efficiency of data integrity verification techniques usually used by the semiconductor industry.

An automotive electronic system prototype demonstrating system safety as a dual redundant engine control system based on the FlexRay network protocol was development. This demonstrator includes the integration of technology and components from each of the partner companies that supports the complete development process for such a safety critical system. The demonstrator therefore includes a tool for turning captured requirements into a system architecture based on FlexRay, integrity checking of the design using a rule-base, integration of this design into a communications software stack to work on the target microcontroller and ECU hardware, sensors and actuators for engine control and finally analysis and system qualification tools.