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Drivers’ physical and physiological states change with prolonged driving. Driving for extended periods of time can lead to an increased risk of low back pain and other musculoskeletal disorders, caused by the discomfort of the seats. Static and dynamic are the two main categories must be considered within the seating development. The posture and orientation of the occupant are the important factors on static comfort. Driving posture measurement is essential for the evaluation of a driver workspace and improved seat comfort design. This study evaluated the comfortable driving posture through physiological and ergonomics measurements of an automotive premium driver seat. The physiological evaluation includes electroencephalographic (EEG) for brain waves, Biopac’s AcqKnowledge program, and subjective measurements on 32 healthy individuals. JACK simulation was used for the ergonomics evaluation, i.e., the magnitude of the spinal loads about lumbar vertebrae was estimated.

This paper presents the Matlab/Simulink-based Software-in-the-Loop Simulation (SILS) tool which is the co-simulator for temporal and functional simulations of control systems. The temporal behavior of a control system is mainly dependent on the implemented software and hardware such as the real-time operating system, target CPU and communication protocol. In this research, the SILS components with temporal attributes are specified as tasks, task executions, real-time schedulers, and real-time networks. Methods for realizing these components in graphical block representations are investigated with Matlab/Simulink, which is the most commonly used tool for designing and simulating control algorithms in control engineering. These components are modeled in graphical blocks of Matlab/Simulink.

In the extremely cost-sensitive and competitive automotive industry, manufacturers and suppliers are constantly searching for means to reduce both time-to-market and development costs. As a kind of solution to satisfy these requirements, Rapid-control prototyping (RCP) has established itself as viable technology, albeit not everywhere yet. One big gap in the development process, however, is the transfer form RCP to a target implementation with all its limitations. This paper presents a new RCP platform, which aims to provide a consistent environment both at the RCP step and at the target code implementation step. To achieve this goal, the proposed prototyping system is designed very similar to the real production ECU as much as possible, and it supports all the features, which are needed in the RCP.

We report a method to automatically generate test cases for automotive embedded software from a UML-based model using XML metadata interchange (XMI). First, the software model created using UML is converted to metadata in XMI format. Then, based on this metadata (which does not depend on a specific language), software test cases for structural testing or requirement-based testing may be generated using an appropriate parser. The model does not need to be implemented using the Object Constraint Language (OCL), and software test cases may be generated using an appropriately defined parser for a given language (which may be C/C++). Because software test cases can be converted to hardware test cases via a stimulus-mapping table, which contains the information on the digital and analog signals, and the communications interface, hardware test cases may also be generated automatically.