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The advance of technology and the demand for new features on vehicles has been challenging the automotive industry to find ways to speed up its development process, while increases the robustness and quality of its products. On this context, the embedded software development for vehicles has been directly impacted. In other words, the number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) considerably increased on the past few years and the number of lines of code, as well as their complexity, have been exponentially increased. In order to deal with this new reality, besides the automotive test prototypes used during the development, the automotive industry has been using different virtual environment to develop, verify and validate its products.

The automotive industry is one of the most strict and demanding industries when it comes to the safety and quality of its products. One of the cornerstones in order to achieve such demands is to have high reliability of its powertrain controls software developed using the V-Cycle methodology. With the V-Cycle approach, it is essential to verify and validate every step of the software development process such as requirements elicitation, code development and prototyping, all this being done before the actual software can be tested on the vehicle. This process is of extreme importance but it comes with the downside of increased project cost and timing. An alternative and solution to the increase in project cost and timing is the use of Hardware-In-the-Loop simulators. The HIL is a powerful tool that has the capability of running real-time simulations of a full vehicle. In order to achieve this, it makes use of high fidelity models with a low error margin compared to real vehicles.