Automotive Safety Software Architecture: A Fault-Tolerant Safety-Critical Software Architecture for Modern Vehicles

Authors

V. Mohan Prabhu, S. Kowalewski - RWTH Aachen University, G. Keßler, M. Jentges -
FEV.io

Summary

The need for sophisticated safety-critical software systems with robust fault tolerance and resilience has increased significantly with the increasing number of electrical and electronic systems in road vehicles. Also, one of the main prerequisites of any safetycritical software system is to be fault-tolerant by design and have the inbuilt capability to be fault-resilient through fault avoidance, detection, and containment. The main strategies to address these challenges are standardisation and introducing modularity, availability, and reusability in safety-critical software. We try to address these challenges by introducing a standardised software architecture tailored to the needs of automotive safety-critical software systems. The traditional architecture concepts used in the design of software systems cannot be directly used for the development of safetycritical embedded systems due to their inherent limitation to directly address non-functional requirements and quality attributes like safety and security. This paper proposes a software reference architecture and development framework named Automotive Safety Software Architecture (ASSA) that addresses these concerns and is specifically designed to meet the tight boundary conditions of safety-critical software development.