DOI

https://doi.org/10.25772/Z555-M644

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2527-8087

Defense Date

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Electrical & Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Dr Carl R Elks

Abstract

With advances in sensing, wireless communications, computing, control, and automation technologies, we are witnessing the rapid uptake of Cyber-Physical Systems across many applications including connected vehicles, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, smart homes etc. Many of these applications are safety-critical in nature and they depend on the correct and safe execution of software and hardware that are intrinsically subject to faults. These faults can be design faults (Software Faults, Specification faults, etc.) or physically occurring faults (hardware failures, Single-event-upsets, etc.). Both types of faults must be addressed during the design and development of these critical systems. Several safety-critical industries have widely adopted Model-Based Engineering paradigms to manage the design assurance processes of these complex CPSs. This thesis studies the application of IEC 61508 compliant model-based design assurance methodology on a representative safety-critical digital architecture targeted for the Nuclear power generation facilities. The study presents detailed experiences and results to demonstrate the benefits of Model testing in finding design flaws and its relevance to subsequent verification steps in the workflow. Additionally, to study the impact of physical faults on the digital architecture we develop a novel property-based fault injection method that overcomes few deficiencies of traditional fault injection methods. The model-based fault injection approach presented here guarantees high efficiency and near-exhaustive input/state/fault space coverage, by utilizing formal model checking principles to identify fault activation conditions and prove the fault tolerance features. The fault injection framework facilitates automated integration of fault saboteurs throughout the model to enable exhaustive fault location coverage in the model.

Rights

© The Author

Is Part Of

VCU University Archives

Is Part Of

VCU Theses and Dissertations

Date of Submission

5-14-2020

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