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Actually automotive industries is in a dilemma: Further customer satisfaction requires further features to be built into cars and this requires more electronics in cars. All this currently happens at a rapidly increasing pace and thus increasing networked cars electronic control systems complexity correspondingly. Networking obviously requires interoperable communication modules consisting of communication hardware and software. And here is the problem: As network protocols are specified mostly in natural languages such as English, no precise and non-ambiguous specification exists. As such implementers may understand the same specification differently. And as a result realizations of the same protocol may behave differently under certain operational conditions. As a consequence mixed suppliers control modules may not be able to communicate properly. Conformance testing is the solution to this problem.

Networking is an important technology in today's vehicles: Up to 100 electronic control units are interlinked through various communication protocols such as CAN, LIN, MOST, etc. As such communication protocols represent a “standard” component in vehicles which is assumed to provide a specified functionality regardless who the manufacturer is. Unfortunately 10 years of practical experience show that implementations of communication protocol specifications done by different manufacturers in most cases are not compliant a priori. Luckily experience of automotive OEMs together with their suppliers and silicon manufacturers have proven that conformance testing is a very effective means to avoid interoperability problems in mixed suppliers automotive systems. The following paper describes for LIN protocol the process of conformance test specification, conformance test suite implementation and the experiences gained while performing such tests.

Current in-vehicle electronics are based on networked modules. Knowing this and taking into account the rapidly increasing number of network nodes in cars, the proper functionality and interoperability of network interfaces produced by various manufacturers is an important pre-requisite in order to obtain a good quality system operation. One way to ensure good interoperability of network interfaces is to apply conformance tests. The following paper therefore outlines the specification of such conformance tests, as they are defined by ISO. Along with the specification of standard conformance tests a set of test extension is proposed checking the proper functionality of a network interface according to its register interface to the processor and its proper behavior in (random) stress situations - referred to as random or robustness tests. Finally an implementation of a tester performing the conformance tests is introduced.