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Electronic controllers for powertrain systems are required to meet the demands for increased system performance and functionality at reasonable cost. It is indispensable to examine the solutions from a range of view points synthetically for cost optimization. This paper describes a cost-effective hardware and software architecture of the electronic controllers for powertrain systems. A new method for noise reduction of a switching regulator, and a low standby current wakeup solution are also discussed as further functions needed for high performance powertrain systems.

This paper describes a development method for object-oriented automotive control software embedded with automatically generated programs from controller models. We have designed control software with object-oriented application frameworks. An application framework consists of objects. Each object is composed of the attribute of a control system and a function to calculate the status. The function is a C function, which is automatically generated from the block diagram of a controller model designed with a computer aided engineering tool. An object is implemented with a wrapper and the generated C function. The wrapper defines the interface and attribute of the object. The wrapper is automatically generated referring to the generated C function. We have applied this method to develop some parts of automotive engine control software and have found that 95% of the source code could be generated automatically from controller models.

A Hardware-In-the-Loop simulator with a vehicle-ready Electronic Control Unit (ECU) coupled with a vehicle model, simulating a real vehicle movement in real time, was developed. The simulator was used to validate the ECU software and hardware components of the Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system. The authors have modularized each vehicle component so that the entire vehicle model can be rebuilt automatically by selecting each component. This feature enables flexible and rapid building of the virtual vehicle. As a result, the simulator with auto building vehicle model allowed the development and validation of the ACC control system for various vehicle configurations.