Virtual fault injection in mechatronic and electronic systems for reliability and safety analysis

Abstract:
Development of electronic systems according to the V-Model is an established standard in many branches of industry today. However, safety analysis is often integrated into the development process only in later stages. Late changes to the system architecture necessitate repeated safety analyses with considerable effort and cost. It is therefore desirable to integrate the safety analysis early in the development process and to perform safety- and reliability validation automatically and in parallel to system development according to the extended V-Model. The failure behavior of electronic components has a significant impact on the reliability of electronic and mechatronic systems. While Monte-Carlo simulation is a well-established tool to predict the effects of component tolerances on system behavior, component failure is usually not considered in an automated way today. For this purpose, methods were investigated that automatically and efficiently predict effects of component failures on the overall system.