Incorporating ISO 26262 Concepts in an Automated Testing Toolchain Using Simulink Design Verifier

The introduction of ISO 26262 concepts has brought important changes in the software development process for automotive software. While making the process more robust by introducing various additional methods of verification and validation, there has been a substantial increase in the development time. Thus, test automation and front loading approaches have become important to meet product timelines and quality. This paper proposes automated testing methods using formal analysis tools like Simulink Design Verifier™ (SLDV) for boundary value testing and interface testing to address the demands of ISO 26262 concepts at unit and component level. In addition, the method of automated boundary value testing proposed differs from the traditional methods and the authors offer an argument as to why the traditional boundary value testing is not required at unit (function) level. There are two aspects of the proposed method: automated test case generation and automated test case execution. The paper discusses the benefits of automatic test case execution when combined with automatic test case generation. Traditional test automation implements the former and has limited advantages. One of the challenges with traditional application of the formal analysis tool is the time taken by the tool to reach to a conclusive decision for the triggered activity, i.e., the execution time of the tool. This shortcoming is overcome by an automated setup where the test framework is triggered during out of office hours, which saves developer’s work time. As a work product of the automated test execution, the developers receive test documentation which provides them with an overview of the results and specific test vectors for further analysis.