Runtime adaptation in safety-critical automotive systems

The cost-efficient development for dependable systems is one of the major future challenges of the automotive industry. Existing fault tolerance approaches are often not applicable and not sufficient. Therefore, innovative alternatives are required.

A possible solution is given by dynamic adaptation. In the case of errors, dynamic adaptation can ensure that the best possible system functionality is achieved and that critical functions are kept alive (survivability). Exploiting implicitly available redundancy, dynamic adaptation provides a cost-efficient means to keep up functionalities as long as possible without requiring expensive explicit redundancy channels.

Unconstrained dynamic adaptation can lead to emergent, unpredictable behavior, making it inapplicable for safety-critical systems. In this paper, we illustrate how adaptation behavior can be explicitly modeled, analyzed, and verified at design time. By this means, it is possible to use the advantages of dynamic adaptation for the realization of safe and reliable systems.