Towards Vehicle-Level Simulator Aided Failure Mode, Effect, and Diagnostic Analysis of Automotive Power Electronics Items

The increasing demand for Electronic Control Units able to perform safety-relevant tasks leads the automotive industry to find novel verification methodologies, capable to decrease the time-to-market and, at the same time, to improve the quality of the assessment. The ISO26262:2018 automotive functional safety standard requires to follow a strict development process, compliant with its “safety lifecycle”. It includes all the phases of the item life, from the concept to the decommissioning. The phase that places most difficulties about its objectivity and repeatability is the hardware/software integration verification since, usually, the software is in charge to mitigate the effects of some possible hardware failures. This paper proposes a novel technique, based on a simulation-based approach, to aid the designers during the Failure Mode, Effect, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA). We consider a power electronics module, to be embedded into electric vehicles powertrains, as a challenging practical example. We performed some tests on it, considering a rear traction car with two independent electric motors, one per each wheel. This system, to allow the vehicle to curve, has to act like a differential gear. Hence, it has a strong safety impact on the driveability of the car. All the involved components have been simulated propagating their behaviours up to the entire vehicle. Due the strong coupling between item failures and vehicle dynamics, a structured way based on coupling fault injection with vehicle dynamic simulation is desirable

Systems-theoretic Safety Assessment of Robotic Telesurgical Systems

Robotic telesurgical systems are one of the most complex medical cyber-physical systems on the market, and have been used in over 1.75 million procedures during the last decade. Despite significant improvements in design of robotic surgical systems through the years, there have been ongoing occurrences of safety incidents during procedures that negatively impact patients. This paper presents an approach for systems-theoretic safety assessment of robotic telesurgical systems using software-implemented fault-injection. We used a systemstheoretic hazard analysis technique (STPA) to identify the potential safety hazard scenarios and their contributing causes in RAVEN II robot, an open-source robotic surgical platform. We integrated the robot control software with a softwareimplemented fault-injection engine which measures the resilience of the system to the identified safety hazard scenarios by automatically inserting faults into different parts of the robot control software. Representative hazard scenarios from real robotic surgery incidents reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) MAUDE database were used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach for safety-based design of robotic telesurgical systems.Comment: Revise based on reviewers feedback. To appear in the the International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security (SAFECOMP) 201

Novel Validation Techniques for Autonomous Vehicles

The automotive industry is facing challenges in producing electrical, connected, and autonomous vehicles. Even if these challenges are, from a technical point of view, independent from each other, the market and regulatory bodies require them to be developed and integrated simultaneously. The development of autonomous vehicles implies the development of highly dependable systems. This is a multidisciplinary activity involving knowledge from robotics, computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, psychology, social studies, and ethics. Nowadays, many Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), like Emergency Braking System, Lane Keep Assistant, and Park Assist, are available. Newer luxury cars can drive by themselves on highways or park automatically, but the end goal is to develop completely autonomous driving vehicles, able to go by themselves, without needing human interventions in any situation. The more vehicles become autonomous, the greater the difficulty in keeping them reliable. It enhances the challenges in terms of development processes since their misbehaviors can lead to catastrophic consequences and, differently from the past, there is no more a human driver to mitigate the effects of erroneous behaviors. Primary threats to dependability come from three sources: misuse from the drivers, design systematic errors, and random hardware failures. These safety threats are addressed under various aspects, considering the particular type of item to be designed. In particular, for the sake of this work, we analyze those related to Functional Safety (FuSa), viewed as the ability of a system to react on time and in the proper way to the external environment. From the technological point of view, these behaviors are implemented by electrical and electronic items. Various standards to achieve FuSa have been released over the years. The first, released in 1998, was the IEC 61508. Its last version is the one released in 2010. This standard defines mainly: • a Functional Safety Management System (FSMS); • methods to determine a Safety Integrated Level (SIL); • methods to determine the probability of failures. To adapt the IEC61508 to the automotive industry’s peculiarity, a newer standard, the ISO26262, was released in 2011 then updated in 2018. This standard provides guidelines about FSMS, called in this case Safety Lifecycle, describing how to develop software and hardware components suitable for functional safety. It also provides a different way to compute the SIL, called in this case Automotive SIL (ASIL), allowing us to consider the average driver’s abilities to control the vehicle in case of failures. Moreover, it describes a way to determine the probability of random hardware failures through Failure Mode, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA). This dissertation contains contributions to three topics: • random hardware failures mitigation; • improvementoftheISO26262HazardAnalysisandRiskAssessment(HARA); • real-time verification of the embedded software. As the main contribution of this dissertation, I address the safety threats due to random hardware failures (RHFs). For this purpose, I propose a novel simulation-based approach to aid the Failure Mode, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) required by the ISO26262 standard. Thanks to a SPICE-level model of the item, and the adoption of fault injection techniques, it is possible to simulate its behaviors obtaining useful information to classify the various failure modes. The proposed approach evolved from a mere simulation of the item, allowing only an item-level failure mode classification up to a vehicle-level analysis. The propagation of the failure modes’ effects on the whole vehicle enables us to assess the impacts on the vehicle’s drivability, improving the quality of the classifications. It can be advantageous where it is difficult to predict how the item-level misbehaviors propagate to the vehicle level, as in the case of a virtual differential gear or the mobility system of a robot. It has been chosen since it can be considered similar to the novel light vehicles, such as electric scooters, that are becoming more and more popular. Moreover, my research group has complete access to its design since it is realized by our university’s DIANA students’ team. When a SPICE-level simulation is too long to be performed, or it is not possible to develop a complete model of the item due to intellectual property protection rules, it is possible to aid this process through behavioral models of the item. A simulation of this kind has been performed on a mobile robotic system. Behavioral models of the electronic components were used, alongside mechanical simulations, to assess the software failure mitigation capabilities. Another contribution has been obtained by modifying the main one. The idea was to make it possible to aid also the Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA). This assessment is performed during the concept phase, so before starting to design the item implementation. Its goal is to determine the hazards involved in the item functionality and their associated levels of risk. The end goal of this phase is a list of safety goals. For each one of these safety goals, an ASIL has to be determined. Since HARA relies only on designers expertise and knowledge, it lacks in objectivity and repeatability. Thanks to the simulation results, it is possible to predict the effects of the failures on the vehicle’s drivability, allowing us to improve the severity and controllability assessment, thus improving the objectivity. Moreover, since simulation conditions can be stored, it is possible, at any time, to recheck the results and to add new scenarios, improving the repeatability. The third group of contributions is about the real-time verification of embedded software. Through Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL), a software integration verification has been performed to test a fundamental automotive component, mixed-criticality applications, and multi-agent robots. The first of these contributions is about real-time tests on Body Control Modules (BCM). These modules manage various electronic accessories in the vehicle’s body, like power windows and mirrors, air conditioning, immobilizer, central locking. The main characteristics of BCMs are the communications with other embedded computers via the car’s vehicle bus (Controller Area Network) and to have a high number (hundreds) of low-speed I/Os. As the second contribution, I propose a methodology to assess the error recovery system’s effects on mixed-criticality applications regarding deadline misses. The system runs two tasks: a critical airplane longitudinal control and a non-critical image compression algorithm. I start by presenting the approach on a benchmark application containing an instrumented bug into the lower criticality task; then, we improved it by injecting random errors inside the lower criticality task’s memory space through a debugger. In the latter case, thanks to the HIL, it is possible to pause the time domain simulation when the debugger operates and resume it once the injection is complete. In this way, it is possible to interact with the target without interfering with the simulation results, combining a full control of the target with an accurate time-domain assessment. The last contribution of this third group is about a methodology to verify, on multi-agent robots, the synchronization between two agents in charge to move the end effector of a delta robot: the correct position and speed of the end effector at any time is strongly affected by a loss of synchronization. The last two contributions may seem unrelated to the automotive industry, but interest in these applications is gaining. Mixed-criticality systems allow reducing the number of ECUs inside cars (for cost reduction), while the multi-agent approach is helpful to improve the cooperation of the connected cars with respect to other vehicles and the infrastructure. The fourth contribution, contained in the appendix, is about a machine learning application to improve the social acceptance of autonomous vehicles. The idea is to improve the comfort of the passengers by recognizing their emotions. I started with the idea to modify the vehicle’s driving style based on a real-time emotions recognition system but, due to the difficulties of performing such operations in an experimental setup, I move to analyze them offline. The emotions are determined on volunteers’ facial expressions recorded while viewing 3D representa- tions showing different calibrations. Thanks to the passengers’ emotional responses, it is possible to choose the better calibration from the comfort point of view

Novel Validation Techniques for Autonomous Vehicles

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

On the Efficient Design and Testing of Dependable Systems Software

Modern computing systems that enable increasingly smart and complex applications permeate our daily lives. We strive for a fully connected and automated world to simplify our lives and increase comfort by offloading tasks to smart devices and systems. We have become dependent on the complex and ever growing ecosystem of software that drives the innovations of our smart technologies. With this dependence on complex software systems arises the question whether these systems are dependable, i.e., whether we can actually trust them to perform their intended functions. As software is developed by human beings, it must be expected to contain faults, and we need strategies and techniques to minimize both their number and the severity of their impact that scale with the increase in software complexity. Common approaches to achieve dependable operation include fault acceptance and fault avoidance strategies. The former gracefully handle faults when they occur during operation, e.g., by isolating and restarting faulty components, whereas the latter try to remove faults before system deployment, e.g., by applying correctness testing and software fault injection (SFI) techniques. On this background, this thesis aims at improving the efficiency of fault isolation for operating system kernel components, which are especially critical for dependable operation, as well as at improving the efficiency of dynamic testing activities to cope with the increasing complexity of software. Using the widely used Linux kernel, we demonstrate that partial fault isolation techniques for kernel software components can be enhanced with dynamic runtime profiles to strike a balance between the expected overheads imposed by the isolation mechanism and the achieved degree of isolation according to user requirements. With the increase in software complexity, comprehensive correctness and robustness assessments using testing and SFI require a substantially increasing number of individual tests whose execution requires a considerable amount of time. We study, considering different levels of the software stack, if modern parallel hardware can be employed to mitigate this increase. In particular, we demonstrate that SFI tests can benefit from parallel execution if such tests are carefully designed and conducted. We furthermore introduce a novel SFI framework to efficiently conduct such experiments. Moreover, we investigate if existing test suites for correctness testing can already benefit from parallel execution and provide an approach that offers a migration path for test suites that have not originally been designed for parallel execution

Nuevas técnicas de inyección de fallos en sistemas embebidos mediante el uso de modelos virtuales descritos en el nivel de transacción

Mejor software y más rápido. Este es el desafío que se deriva de la necesidad de construir sistemas cada vez más inteligentes. En cualquier diseño embebido actual, el software es un componente fundamental que dota al sistema de una alta capacidad de configuración, gran número de funcionalidades y elasticidad en el comportamiento del sistema en situaciones excepcionales. Si además el desarrollo del conjunto hardware/software integrado en un System on Chip (SoC), forma parte de un sistema de control crítico donde se deben tener en cuenta requisitos de tolerancia a fallos, la verificación exhaustiva de los mismos consume un porcentaje cada vez más importante de los recursos totales dedicados al desarrollo y puesta en funcionamiento del sistema. En este contexto, el uso de metodologías clásicas de codiseño y coverificación es completamente ineficiente, siendo necesario el uso de nuevas tecnologías y herramientas para el desarrollo y verificación tempranos del software embebido. Entre ellas se puede incluir la propuesta en este trabajo de tesis, la cual aborda el problema mediante el uso de modelos ejecutables del hardware definidos en el nivel de transacción. Debido a los estrictos requisitos de robustez que imperan en el desarrollo de software espacial, es necesario llevar a cabo tareas de verificación en etapas muy tempranas del desarrollo para asegurar que los mecanismos de tolerancia a fallos, avanzados en la especificación del sistema, funcionan adecuadamente. De forma general, es deseable que estas tareas se realicen en paralelo con el desarrollo hardware, anticipando problemas o errores existentes en la especificación del sistema. Además, la verificación completa de los mecanismos de excepción implementados en el software, puede ser imposible de realizar en hardware real ya que los escenarios de fallo deben ser artificial y sistemáticamente generados mediante técnicas de inyección de fallos que permitan realizar campañas de inyección controlables, observables y reproducibles. En esta tesis se describe la investigación, desarrollo y uso de una plataforma virtual denominada "Leon2ViP", con capacidad de inyección de fallos y basada en interfaces SystemC/TLM2 para el desarrollo temprano y verificación de software embebido en el marco del proyecto Solar Orbiter. De esta forma ha sido posible ejecutar y probar exactamente el mismo código binario a ejecutar en el hardware real, pero en un entorno más controlable y determinista. Ello permite la realización de campañas de inyección de fallos muy focalizadas que no serían posible de otra manera. El uso de "\Leon2ViP" ha significado una mejora significante, en términos de coste y tiempo, en el desarrollo y verificación del software de arranque de la unidad de control del instrumento (ICU) del detector de partículas energéticas (EPD) embarcado en Solar Orbiter

Fault-tolerant satellite computing with modern semiconductors

Miniaturized satellites enable a variety space missions which were in the past infeasible, impractical or uneconomical with traditionally-designed heavier spacecraft. Especially CubeSats can be launched and manufactured rapidly at low cost from commercial components, even in academic environments. However, due to their low reliability and brief lifetime, they are usually not considered suitable for life- and safety-critical services, complex multi-phased solar-system-exploration missions, and missions with a longer duration. Commercial electronics are key to satellite miniaturization, but also responsible for their low reliability: Until 2019, there existed no reliable or fault-tolerant computer architectures suitable for very small satellites. To overcome this deficit, a novel on-board-computer architecture is described in this thesis.Robustness is assured without resorting to radiation hardening, but through software measures implemented within a robust-by-design multiprocessor-system-on-chip. This fault-tolerant architecture is component-wise simple and can dynamically adapt to changing performance requirements throughout a mission. It can support graceful aging by exploiting FPGA-reconfiguration and mixed-criticality.  Experimentally, we achieve 1.94W power consumption at 300Mhz with a Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale+ proof-of-concept, which is well within the powerbudget range of current 2U CubeSats. To our knowledge, this is the first COTS-based, reproducible on-board-computer architecture that can offer strong fault coverage even for small CubeSats.European Space AgencyComputer Systems, Imagery and Medi