Simulation-based Holistic Functional Safety Assessment for Networked Cyber-Physical Systems

Functional safety is a major concern in today's networked cyber-physical systems such as connected machines, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent environments. Simulation is a well-known methodology for the assessment of functional safety. Simulation models of networked cyber-physical systems are very heterogeneous relying on digital hardware, analog hardware, and network domains. Current functional safety assessment is mainly focused on digital hardware failures while minor attention is devoted to analog hardware and not at all to the interconnecting network. We propose a holistic methodology for simulation-based safety assessment in which safety mechanisms are tested in a simulation environment reproducing the high-level behavior of digital hardware, analog hardware, and network. Also faults are tested at high abstraction level to speed up analysis.