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Improving the Reliability of Engine Control Units in Vehicles

Moloudi, Mohammad Amin | 2023

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 55865 (19)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Computer Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Ejlali, Alireza
  7. Abstract:
  8. Vehicles are safety-critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) consisting of hundreds of control units. The Engine Control Unit (ECU) is a fundamental part of a vehicle, and by applying reliability improvement techniques to the ECU, we can prevent catastrophes, performance degradation, and environmental damage. However, like any other CPS, traditional reliability assessment of the cyber and physical parts is insufficient as these parts are tightly coupled. Furthermore, the ECU consists of many mutually dependent subsystems, the failure of which will fail the whole vehicle system. Hence, to compensate for the hardware redundancy cost, we have improved the reliability of the system's bottleneck. To achieve this goal, we have studied the reliability of subsystems while contemplating their CPS nature. To this end, the complete model of a vehicle's engine is simulated, and a fault injection tool is presented to assess the subsystem's reliability. In order to validate the simulated model, a hardware implementation of the Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) part of the ECU is presented. In addition to the main contribution of this research, which is to improve the reliability of the system's bottleneck, we have analyzed the ETC implementation to discover all possible failures and causal faults using the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and we have provided a method to detect, locate, and mask such faults. Finally, due to the experimental results, we can determine the Manifold Absolute Pressure (MAP) sensor as the reliability bottleneck of the system. A triple modular redundancy method applied to the MAP sensor improves the vulnerability factor of the bottleneck from 46.2% to 19.1%. The vulnerability factor of the whole engine control system has been improved by 1.66 times
  9. Keywords:
  10. Reliability ; Safety-Critical Real-Time System ; Engine Control ; Cyber-Physical Systems ; Fault Injection ; Vulnerability Factor ; Vehicles

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