Applying runtime monitoring for automotive electronic development

Abstract

This paper shows how runtime monitoring can be applied at different phases of electronic-product development in automotive industry. Starting with concept development, runtime monitors are generated from the product requirements and then embedded in a chip simulation to track the specification compliance at an early stage. In the later phase when a prototype or a product is available, the runtime monitors from the concept development are reused for synthesis into FPGA for monitoring the implementation correctness of the product/system during runtime tests at real-time speeds. This is advantageous for long-term test scenarios where simulation becomes impractical or where evaluation of large amounts of data is required. For example, about 480K frames/min are exchanged between a sensor and an ECU. This is beyond the capability of an engineer to check the specification conformance of every frame even for one minute of the system run. We embed monitors in a real-world industrial case study, where we runtime-check the requirements of an automotive sensor interface both in simulation and for the test chip.