Practical Use of AUTOSAR in Safety Critical Automotive Systems 2009-01-0748

With the increased adoption of AUTOSAR operating systems across the different automotive system domains a notable exception has been that of the safety critical systems. This domain has strict requirements on precise requirements capturing, proven design flow, robust implementation, exhaustive testing, detailed documentation and traceability, and project management processes. These requirements are normally prohibitive to adopt for commercial ‘one size fits all’ solutions due to the huge expense and resources required to meet such a strict regime. So under these constraints AUTOSAR is far from a perfect fit for safety systems. Nonetheless, the attractive features of reuse and portability still make AUTOSAR based systems highly desirable. This paper describes a solution to this dilemma by embedding a supervision subsystem inside a dual core AUTOSAR compliant microcontroller to give extremely deep levels of diagnostic coverage at runtime, not only for the hardware but also for the software and, by implication, the tooling and design specifications as well.