Non-intrusive in-situ requirements monitoring of embedded system

Abstract

Accounting for all operating conditions of a system at the design stage is typically infeasible for complex systems. Monitoring and verifying system requirements at runtime enable a system to continuously and introspectively ensure the system is operating correctly in the presence of dynamic execution scenarios. In this article, we present a requirements-driven methodology enabling efficient runtime monitoring of embedded systems. The proposed approach extracts a runtime monitoring graph from system requirements specified using UML sequence diagrams. Non-intrusive, on-chip hardware dynamically monitors the system execution, verifies the execution adheres to the requirements model, and in the event of a failure provides detailed information that can be analyzed to determine the root cause. Using case studies of an autonomous vehicle and pacemaker prototypes, we analyze the relationship between event coverage, detection rate, and hardware requirements.