Physics-based software analysis for safety-critical embedded applications: work-in-progress

Physics-based software systems are a new trend in automotive feature and control implementation. They are used for modern applications in the context of automated driving and ADAS. Implementing physical models on critical embedded targets (for example electronic control systems) causes many safety related challenges, as they are far more complex than ordinary control algorithms. The code needs to be secured appropriately. This paper proposes a new approach to include physical properties in the V&V (verification & validation) and testing process in order to analyze functional code behavior of physical systems on targets automatically. For this, physical properties are extracted from the physics-based models, compared with databases and defined as constraints in order to analyze discretizations and calculations of the code. The mass conservation law for example is very beneficial for evaluating different discretization methods of model code automatically. This way, an evaluation of the correct behavior is faster, more efficient and safety and development time of physics-based embedded application code is improved. Our approach proved to be useful in finding physics-related errors in physics-based embedded systems automatically. The generated physical constraints can be used for test data generation.