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Today’s modern automobiles are aimed at giving the user an intuitive, secure, and reliable experience, serving his needs before and even after completion of his trip. The advances in automotive and consumer electronics are defining new boundaries for manufacturers to meet these demands. Digital vehicle entry systems are one of the key technology advances that enable vehicle to interact with external dynamic entities (e.g., smartphone loaded with applications). The system authenticates the user with not only an entry into his/her vehicle, but also offer a wide range of personalized comfort functions, thus enriching the user experience. These requirements lead to a dramatic increase in software complexity coupled with market competition to support the automotive industry standard AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture). To master these challenges, an early virtual validation of the digital vehicle entry functions is crucial for success now more than ever.

The way to autonomous driving is closely connected to the capability of verifying and validating Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), as it is one of the main challenges to achieve secure, reliable and thereby socially accepted self-driving cars. Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) based testing methods offer the great advantage of validating components and systems in an early stage of the development cycle, and they are established in automotive industry. When validating ADAS using HiL test benches, engineers face different barriers and conceptual difficulties: How to pipe simulated signals into multiple sensors including radar, ultrasonic, video, or lidar? How to combine classical physical simulations, e.g. vehicle dynamics, with sophisticated three-dimensional, GPU-based environmental simulations? In this article, we present current approaches of how to master these challenges and provide guidance by showing the advantages and drawbacks of each approach.

Already today the car is a complex embedded system with a multitude of linked subsystems and components. In future these distributed systems have to be developed faster and with high quality via integrated, optimized design process. Scalable systems with an increased maintainability can be generated, if an agreement on a standardized technical architecture (hard- and software) is made at the beginning of the development. The challenges in the design of such distributed systems can be met through advanced automotive systems and software engineering in conjunction with suitable processes, methods and tools. Because the designers that must collaborate are distributed in different divisions or companies, it is essential that an overarching model based design methodology is used.