Leveraging Fault Injection Techniques in Critical Industrial Applications

The importance of fault injection techniques is widely recognized by the critical systems industry. Fault injection allows evaluating error handling/mitigation mechanisms and assessing system safety properties under exceptional conditions. Even of more relevance, the use of fault injection is currently recommended by many international standards, such as ISO-26262 and DO-178B, to support the system validation and certification process. This chapter introduces design and technical challenges of fault injection techniques in the context of real industrial applications. Discussion starts from a generic framework that presents the functional components implementing a fault injection campaign. The adoption of the framework to support system evaluation by means of fault injection is shown for Intel Core i7 and AUTOSAR.