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The assessment of the safety and the reliability for embedded systems is mainly performed early in the design cycle, at system level. The objective is to detect the potential failures which could lead to an undesirable event. Given the increasing critical feature of the functions executed by the software in automotive and aeronautics, it becomes necessary to perform safety analysis at lower level of the design cycle such as at implementation stage. However, software models at this stage are complex and heterogeneous so the analyses are often manually realized. As the software models are also very large (thousands of basic software components), the analysis is labor-intensive and error-prone so it is not obvious to obtain relevant results. Therefore, the analysis on software models at implementation stage is often neglected.

The software part of an automotive embedded system continues to increase significantly. It enables the development of new functionalities and it may improve the quality and comfort of driver assistance functions. However, the design of such functions becomes a complex task involving networked ECUs (Electronic Control Unit), several sensors/actuators and a set of embedded networks. The introduction of Model-Based Development (MBD) in the automotive field promised to improve the development process by allowing continuity between requirements definition, system design and the distributed system implementation. Further, the definition of AUTOSAR consortium standardized the design of such automotive embedded system by allowing the portability of software functions on the hardware architecture and their reuse. It defines a set of rules and interfaces to design, interconnect, deploy and configure a set of application software components (SWCs).