Testing Diagnostics Components Supervising Functional Safety Requirements

Abstract


 
 
 For safety-critical applications, safety diagnostics components are an attractive safeguard for meeting some specified safety requirements under operation. Like a monitor, such a software artifact shall supervise a system under operation, and furthermore, if needed, it overrides the system’s control software in order to maintain safety. In this paper we contribute to testing such a component, suggesting an approach that draws on fault injection and, in order to enhance deployability, accommodates also needs in respect of business issues like intellectual property disclosure and resource efficiency. The required testing oracle we directly obtain from the defined and formalized functional safety requirements, for the purpose of assessing that the safety diagnostic component in- deed maintains safety also under faulty conditions.