Modeling faults in communication protocols based on an aspect-oriented method

Faults in industrial communication protocols represent an important problem for industrial systems as they may lead to severe losses. Observing the need for approaches to deal with this type of problem, this paper studies reliability aspects related to industrial communication protocols and the modeling of possible communication faults. The work proposes a requirements specification based on aspect-oriented concepts to map and model common faults in design phases of embedded systems. A model integrating fault modeling in communication protocols extending the Real-Time From Requirements to Design using Aspects (RT-FRIDA) framework is presented. A case study on vehicular networks was conducted considering the nonfunctional requirements specification of an Active Suspension System. Then, a sequence of fault requirements based in recent studies is modeled and presented to validate the proposed approach. The main contribution of this work is to enable the use of fault modeling in communication protocols and aspect-oriented modeling techniques to mitigate the fault impact in the timing behavior of critical tasks. This study indicates the use of observers' technique modeled to fault diagnosis, so that they can be aggregated into a real-time control system.