A Fault Modeling Based Runtime Diagnostic Mechanism for Vehicular Distributed Control Systems

This paper presents a study about a runtime mechanism to monitor the performance degradation in intra-vehicular networks. The proposed mechanism focuses on the integration of fault modeling in communication protocols, as non-functional requirements (NFR), using aspect-oriented modeling (AOM), to model the performance degradation generated by faults, linking test and design phases of distributed control systems. A case study analyzing the mechanism performance in both CAN and CAN-FD protocols was conducted considering the NFR specification related to fault disturbances. In order to evaluate and simulate the mechanism under real fault scenarios, an active suspension control system was considered as an example of a critical control system and faults were injected using the hardware Vector VH6501 (CAN disturbance interface). The network performance analysis was made based on the software Vector CANoe considering different network busloads and CAN/CAN-FD rates between 1 to 4 Mbps. Results show that the mechanism efficiently detects anomalous events on performance with short response time with busloads up to 30%. The performed experiments show better performance on CAN-FD registering lower average jitter during fault injection in all busloads tested scenarios.