Application of Software Watchdog as a Dependability Software Service for Automotive Safety Relevant Systems

Abstract

To face the challenges resulting from the increasing density of application software components and higher dependability requirements of the future safety systems in the automotive electronics, a dependability software service to monitor individual application software components in runtime is required in order to improve the overall system dependability. This paper proposes the application of a software watchdog service providing heartbeat monitoring and program flow checking. The software watchdog is integrated in a software platform for the automotive safety electronics. A model-based design with Matlab/Simulink and an evaluation of this software watchdog service in a hardware-in-the-loop validator are also given.