System Health Monitoring for Autonomous Systems

With the growing complexity of software in vehicles, the risk that different solutions from different providers will not be compatible with each other is increasing. For this reason, a worldwide development partnership of vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, service providers and companies from the automotive electronics, semiconductor and software industry was established with AUTOSAR. The primary goal of this partnership is to jointly develop and establish an open industry standard for automotive E/E software architecture.

By standardizing common methodology, basic system functions and functional interfaces, development partners can integrate, exchange, re-use and transfer functions within a vehicle network and substantially improve their efficiency of development.

In addition to Fraunhofer IKS, Fraunhofer FOKUS and Fraunhofer AISEC are also involved as members.

As part of this collaboration, Fraunhofer IKS together with other members conducts research mainly in the practical application of System Health Management. In addition, the scientists of Fraunhofer IKS evaluate concepts and research new solutions on adaptive and autonomous systems that comply with the standard and can thus be directly transferred to industrial practice.

Currently, Fraunhofer IKS is part of two working groups:

Working Group Safety (WG-SAF)

One of the main challenges with autonomous systems is an appropriate diagnosis and safety management to ensure system health and operability. To solve these challenges, systems need to be aware of malfunctions and potential issues of single sensors or modules within the systems. The WG-SAF pursues the goal of improving and standardizing the System Health Monitoring (SHM) across various platforms. By evaluating health information from multiple platforms, health indicators are created that describe the health of a subsystem. For instance, this makes it possible to react optimally to the failure of vehicle functionalities.

Working Group Application Interfaces (WG-AIF)

The WG-AIF is working on the standardization of automated driving sensor interfaces. In the future, Fraunhofer IKS sees potential in a higher degree of automation in design and validation and verification activities. This is to be achieved with a strong linkage between model-based safety analysis and assurance cases with actual implementation.