Electronic design on detailed hardware level for automotive safety-related systems requires evaluation of the hardware architecture to cope with random hardware failures. The international standard ISO 26262 - functional safety for road vehicles - claims two methods: hardware architectural metrics and evaluation of safety goal violations as a probabilistic approach. Although the utilization of these analyses is required, annotations of failure data in combination with performing evaluation of a preliminary hardware architecture using deposited failure data is not supported in an integrated model-based development environment.
To overcome these inconveniences, we analyzed the ISO 26262, in particular Part 5 for product development at the hardware level, to provide both, meta-model for failure description of detailed hardware and performing evaluation of the hardware architecture. This UML-compliant meta-model expands existing EAST-ADL2 constructs. We implemented our concepts in a model-based architecture description language for large scaled electric and electronic architectures. To deposit specific failure rates and modes, we provide a library concept for hardware component types. Besides modeling schematics using the type library, an automatic preparation for characterization of safety-related hardware components is provided. To perform quantified analysis, we acquire relevant failure data using model queries and a metric framework to implement the equations for hardware evaluation according to ISO 26262 Part 5. Detailed results and compliance with target values including dedicated measures are documented in generated reports.
