Timing analysis of safety-critical automotive software: The AUTOSAFE tool flow

Automotive software applications implement a variety of control algorithms, with many of them being safety-critical in nature. A typical design flow starts with modeling these control algorithms using tools like MATLAB/Simulink. However, at this stage, a number of assumptions, like negligible sensor-to-actuator delay and instantaneous computation of the controller software, are often made. In particular, the details of the software implementation and the computing platform, both eventually defining the timing properties of the applications, are not accounted for. Such idealistic assumptions can cause a significant deviation of the control performance compared to what was proven at the modeling stage. This is usually addressed with multiple design iterations, which are costly and may lead to over-provisioned and thus poorly designed systems. In this paper we attempt to address this problem by proposing a design-and tool flow that integrates software-and platform-level timing information into the high-level modeling stage. We outline our proposed flow using concrete, industry-strength design tools.