Investigating and Coordinating Safety-critical Feature Interactions in Automotive Systems Using Simulation

Automotive systems are safety-critical cyber-physical systems. In particular, undesired feature interaction can lead to safety-critical behavior. In order to address this problem, we investigate physical feature interaction in this context using simulation (with more than one physical variable). This allows us to visualize both the behavior of features in isolation and their interaction. Our major result is a new insight about feature coordination. In such a cyberphysical context, it can be insufficient to coordinate as usual by giving one feature priority over another one. Instead, coordinating based on a physical variable involved in the feature interaction appears to be both necessary and sufficient. In summary, we present our investigation of safetycritical feature interactions and their coordination in automotive systems using simulation, and its results.