Toward an MDD-based Analysis of Stateful and Variant-rich Automotive Functions

The high integration of (sub-) systems performing safety critical automotive functions characterizes the current development in the automotive industry. The development and analysis is challenged by an increasing complexity resulting from product customization and variance in implementations by software-hardware solutions. In order to save costs for such scenarios, a systematic analysis of the dependencies between functions, as well as the functional and technical variance, is required. In this paper we introduce a new approach which allows to compactly represent and analyze a function with its different configurations, states, hardware modules, and software variants—also: Product Line Fault Tree (PLFT)—in a unified data structure based on Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs). The methodology allows to represent the function ́s architecture within an MDD and transfer it in Fault Tree (FT)and Minimal Cut Sets (MCSs)-MDDs. Therefore, complete fault trees are analyzed in one step—opposed to stepwise analyzing FTs of all configurations, software variants, and states. Summing up, this article introduces a systematic approach allowing to analyze fault propagation in variant-rich and stateful functions.