Towards simulation based evaluation of safety goal violations in automotive systems

With the advent of the ISO 26262 it became crucial to prove that electrical and electronic products delivered into safety-related automotive applications are adequately safe. For this purpose safety goal violations due to random hardware failures need to be evaluated. In order to gain evident results for argumentation within the evaluation, a fault injection based approach is utilized. Potential risk scenarios are initiated by injection of analog and digital faults into the heterogeneous behavioral model which comprises the safety-related hardware. For fault injection in heterogeneous models, we propose analog saboteurs, designed in VHDL-AMS, by which amongst electrical or mechanical, diverse energy domain analog hardware faults may be injected. For demonstration of this approach, a hardware model, comprising lithium-ion battery cells with a cell balancing module and safety-related circuitry is used.