Safety assurance for automotive over the air updates: unit-level modeling, testing and analysis

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Automotive companies are increasingly investing in over-the-air (OTA) updates to effectively and efficiently update the vehicles' software and increase their safety. OTA updates modify the software components installed in a car wirelessly and enable frequent changes in their behaviors. However, OTA updates are introducing novel problems for safety assurance, due to the different software configurations deployed in vehicles that need to be considered. The number of these configurations increases over time because a) the software has to be configured for multiple vehicle hardware platforms that can potentially change over time; b) as the frequency of updates increases, the range of deployed versions becomes wider and more fragmented. The goal of this project is to support software engineers in analyzing the safety of OTA updates. This project will develop novel techniques that support safety engineers to create and manage software assurance cases that refer to OTA updates, in the Verification and Validation (V&V) activities. Specifically, this project will (a) develop, manage and incrementally update assurance cases of the entire set of software configurations, treated as a product line, and (b) develop a set of V&V techniques and methodologies to reason about different configurations as a single product line, aiming to facilitate the development, analysis, and deployment of functionally correct OTA updates. Canada will significantly benefit from the outcomes of this project. The proposed techniques will reduce the costs for automotive industries in producing safe OTA updates and increase the safety of Canadian vehicles. OTA updates are introducing a new software market. This project will push Canada to become one of the leaders in the software development of future vehicles. The collaboration between the University of Toronto, McMaster University, General Motors (GM), and Critical Systems Labs (CSL) will enhance the research reputation of Canada. Finally, the HQP involved in the project will receive extensive training. The skills they acquire will further push Canadian research and innovation.