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Lightning strikes on automobiles are usually rare, though they can be fatal to occupants and hazardous to electronic control systems. Vehicles’ metal bodies are normally considered to be an effective shield against lightning. Modern body designs, however, often have wide window openings, and plastic body parts have become popular. Lightning can enter the cabin of vehicles through their radio antennas. In the near future, automobiles may be integrated into the electric power grid, which will cause issues related to the smart grid and the vehicle-to-grid concept. Even today, electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) are charged at home or in parking lots. Such automobiles are no longer isolated from the power grid and thus are subject to electric surges caused by lightning strikes on the power grid.

This paper describes a Virtual Validation Cloud (V₂Cloud), a new computation platform designed for extensive failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) of an automotive electronic control system. Recently, automotive developers have been requested to execute enormous amounts of system-level tests in order to assure functional safety of electric control systems. Moreover, the upcoming industry standard, ISO26262, demands that system-level validation assures extensive sets of test vectors and clarifies results of the tests as evidence of functional safety. It is unrealistic to execute these system-level tests by only using conventional hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS). Virtual HILS (VHILS), a system-level validation environment for automotive systems based on co-simulation of software and mechatronics, has already been proposed. Virtualizing an automotive electronic control system makes its testing environment more software-centric and independent of actual hardware.

This paper describes Virtual-Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (VHILS), a new validation method for real-time control systems. HILS integrates multiple-technology domain simulators and uses no actual hardware components. Target software in binary code formats are executed with CoMET™, a virtual processor platform and physical layer signals are emulated with MATLAB®/Simulink®. Thus, VHILS can replace HILS, which is widely used for control software validation today. The VHILS was applied to the development of adaptive cruise control system (ACCS), and driver maneuvering, vehicle dynamics, microcontroller operation and CAN communication were modeled. The data exchange between multi-domain simulation and communication modeling were identified to be the primary causes of longer computational time.

This paper proposes a new development method for highly reliable real-time embedded control systems using a CPU model-based hardware/software co-simulation. We take an approach that allows the full simulation of the virtual mechanical control system including CPU and object code level software. In this paper, Renesas SH-2A microcontroller model was developed on CoMET™ platform from VaST Systems Technology. A ETC (Electronic Throttle Control) system and engine control system were chosen to prove this concept. The ETB (Electronic Throttle Body) model on Saber® simulator from Synopsys® or engine model on MATLAB®/Simulink® simulator from MathWorks can be simulated with the SH-2A model. To help the system design, debug and evaluation, we developed an integrated behavior analyzer, which can display CPU behavior graphically during the simulation without affecting the simulation result, such as task level CPU load, interrupt statistics, software variable transition chart, and so on.