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Automotive companies have invested a fortune over the last three decades developing real-time embedded control strategies and software to achieve desired functions and performance attributes. Over time, these control algorithms have matured and achieved optimum behavior. The companies have vast repositories of embedded software for a variety of control features that have been validated and deployed for production. These software functions can be reused with minimal modifications for future applications. The companies are also constantly looking for new ways to improve the productivity of the development process that may translate into lower development costs, higher quality and faster time-to-market. All companies are currently embracing Model Based Design (MBD) tools to help achieve the gains in productivity. The most cost effective approach would be to reuse the available legacy software for carry-over features while developing new features with the new MBD tools.

Ford Motor Company has developed an Integrated Modeling Environment (IME) for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) control system development. This paper presents the Integrated Modeling Environment which facilitates the design and development methodology for the production control algorithms to seamlessly move from simulation to the embedded microcontroller environment. The IME encompasses requirement management, system analysis and verification testing at multiple levels of the Systems Engineering V. In addition, the application of this environment for developing HEV control system (production algorithms and code) is also presented.