Model-based Fault Injection Experiments for the Safety Analysis of Exoskeleton System

TL;DR

This paper presents a customizable Simulink-based fault injection tool, FIBlock, for evaluating fault tolerance in safety-critical systems like exoskeletons, enabling detailed analysis of fault impacts on system reliability.

Contribution

Introduction of FIBlock, a flexible Simulink block for model-based fault injection in cyber-physical systems, supporting complex fault scenarios and chained error modeling.

Findings

Identified critical fault durations affecting exoskeleton reliability.

Demonstrated fault injection in sensors and hardware components.

Provided insights into fault tolerance thresholds for safety-critical systems.

Abstract

Model-based fault injection methods are widely used for the evaluation of fault tolerance in safety-critical control systems. In this paper, we introduce a new model-based fault injection method implemented as a highlycustomizable Simulink block called FIBlock. It supports the injection of typical faults of essential heterogeneous components of Cyber-Physical Systems, such as sensors, computing hardware, and network. The FIBlock GUI allows the user to select a fault type and configure multiple parameters to tune error magnitude, fault activation time, and fault exposure duration. Additional trigger inputs and outputs of the block enable the modeling of conditional faults. Furthermore, two or more FIBlocks connected with these trigger signals can model chained errors. The proposed fault injection method is demonstrated with a lower-limb EXO-LEGS exoskeleton, an assistive device for the elderly in everyday life. The EXO-LEGS model-based dynamic control is realized in the Simulink environment and allows easy integration of the aforementioned FIBlocks. Exoskeletons, in general, being a complex CPS with multiple sensors and actuators, are prone to hardware and software faults. In the case study, three types of faults were investigated: 1) sensor freeze, 2) stuck-at-0, 3) bit-flip. The fault injection experiments helped to determine faults that have the most significant effects on the overall system reliability and identify the fine line for the critical fault duration after that the controller could no longer mitigate faults.