What is ESSaRel?

The devices that surround us in all areas of life are becoming more and more comfortable and powerful due to intelligent embedded subsystems, replacing classical electromechanical solutions. As a result, the number of embedded systems (ES) that are safety critical has increased significantly and will continue to do so. Numerous examples can be found in the areas of automotive, medical and avionic products such as fly-by-wire aircraft controls or the electronic stability program (ESP) used in modern cars.

During the development of safety-critical ES, automation and tight integration of dependability analyses into the system design process save significant amounts of time and effort. Therefore, the benefit of comprehensive development tools offering automated analyses based on (unified functional and non-functional) system models can hardly be overestimated. Detailed models may be very large, making it necessary to employ modularisation and abstraction mechanisms as well as efficient algorithms and representations.

ESSaRel screenshot

A multitude of techniques have been proposed and used to model, analyse and predict software and hardware quality characteristics. Among them are fault trees, Markov chains, Petri nets and statistical reliability models. It may not be possible to obtain realistic results for ES by using a single technique only. The application of different methods to different parts of a system, combining them into meaningful results, can be a solution. This requires compositional approaches that integrate a variety of modelling and analysis methods.

In order to achieve these goals the ESSaRel project has developed a flexible dependability integration framework for ES. The ESSaRel framework can compose and integrate analysis models with different characteristics, for example

1. Component fault trees (CFT).

2. State/event fault trees (SEFT).

3. Markov chains.

4. Statecharts.

to support developers of safety-critical ES. Similar to the predecessor tool UWG3 ,the ESSaRel component concept makes it easy to model system components independently and to unite them for analysis. The current version already offers CFT and Markov chains that can be composed hierarchically. New model and analysis types will be easily addable by the way of plugins.

Try out ESSaRel today: