Safety-Aware Deployment Synthesis and Trade-Off Analysis of Apollo Autonomous Driving Platform

abstract

The adoption of autonomous cars requires operational critical functions even in the event of HW faults and/or SW defects, and protection of safety-critical functions against security threats. Defining appropriate safe and secure architectures is challenging and costly. In previous work, we have proposed tools to automate the recommendation of safety and security patterns for safety-critical systems. However, safety and security measures may (negatively) influence system performance, besides introducing additional development effort. We present a design space exploration approach, a model-based engineering workflow and tool prototype for automated guidance on trade-off decisions when applying safety and security patterns on a given (unsafe) baseline architecture. Based on models that abstract the vehicle’s functionality and its software and hardware components, as well as an engine for the automated pattern recommendation, we investigate the optimization of HW/SW deployments, and provide a trade-off analysis for different architecture candidates. We implemented our approach in an open-source tool and evaluate it with a model of the Apollo autonomous driving platform.