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Due to the continuously increasing number of electronic control units (ECUs) in modern cars, and their growing complexity, automated tests not only of single ECUs but also of interconnected ECUs have become an important step in the development of automotive electronics. These tasks require new test systems. This paper describes the problems engineers face when developing and testing today's car electronics, as well as a high-end hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) tool set (hardware, software, models) applied to the testing of four networked ECUs for engine management, vehicle dynamics control, automatic transmission, and an active suspension system. The tool set comprises general features needed for HIL tests, like automated code generation for real-time models using MATLAB/Simulink and a comprehensive set of dedicated hardware (processor and I/O hardware).

Model-based software development is increasingly being used to develop software for electronic control units (ECUs). When developing safety-related software, compared to non-safety-related software development, additional requirements specified by relevant safety-standards have to be met. Meeting these requirements should also be considered to be best practices for non-safety-related software. This paper introduces a model-based reference workflow for the development of safety-related software conforming to relevant safety-standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262. The reference workflow discusses requirements traceability aspects, software architecture considerations that help to support modular development and ease the verification of model parts and the code generated from those model parts, and the selection and enforcement of modeling and coding guidelines.

Automotive manufacturers and suppliers of electronic control units (ECUs) will be challenged more and more in the future to reduce costs and the time needed for ECU development. At the same time, increasing requirements concerning exhaust gas emissions, drivability, onboard diagnostics and fuel consumption have led to the growing complexity of modern engines and the associated management systems. As a result, the number and complexity of control parameters and look-up tables in the ECU software is increasing dramatically. Thus, in powertrain applications especially, calibration development has become a time-consuming and cost-intensive stage in the overall ECU development process. This paper describes the current situation in calibration development and shows how the new dSPACE Calibration System will face this situation. It provides an overview of the main benefits of the tool, which has been designed in close cooperation with calibration engineers.

Due to the rapidly increasing number of electronic control units (ECUs) in modern vehicles, software and ECU testing plays a major role within the development of automotive electronics. To ensure effective as well as efficient testing within the whole development process, a seamless transition in terms of the reusability of tests and test data as well as powerful and efficient means for developing and describing tests are required. This paper therefore presents a new integration approach for modern test development and test management. Besides a very easy-to-use way of describing tests graphically, the main focus of the new approach is on the management of a large number of tests, test data, and test results, allowing close integration into the automotive development processes.

We are the first to report about a micromachined flow sensor directly integrated in the Common Rail injection nozzle body between the double guidance and the tip of the nozzle. The thermal measurement principle is chosen, because it enables a very precise and fast detection of gaseous and liquid mass flows. Additionally, the velocity field in the nozzle is only slightly influenced by the integration of the sensor in the nozzle body due to the negligible height of the sensitive layer. For a hot film anemometer, a high pressure stable ceramic substrate can be used, fabricated in a low cost batch process. The technology, to fabricate the sensor, as well as the first flow measurements, carried out at a high pressure test set up, are presented.

Suspension systems have a major effect on the handling characteristics of a vehicle, particularly ride comfort and handling safety, and thus substantially determine its character. Their increasing significance is reflected by the greater value that ever more demanding customers attribute to the properties ride comfort and handling safety. Now that the potential of conventional, passive systems is largely exhausted, adaptive and active systems open up new possibilities, e.g.: the suppression of rolling and pitching movements, handling and ride height independent of load, handling characteristics and ride height adaptable to situation and customer requirement. The DaimlerChrysler active suspension and damping system (Active Body Control – ABC) manages to resolve the conflict of aims between handling safety and ride comfort which afflicts conventional fixed suspension systems, and as a result offers greater freedom of layout whilst enabling optimization of both target criteria.

The increase of active safety will demand more and more electronic intelligence, if a drastic optimization of conventional systems is not possible any more. Starting from today's mechatronic systems, the trend leads via tomorrow's smart electronic systems to the future electronic networking of all intelligent vehicle systems. The paper describes the present status of these systems in Europe and the possibilities of increasing the active safety by using electronic intelligence.

Automotive technology is rapidly changing with electrification of vehicles, driver assistance systems, advanced safety systems etc. This advancement in technology is making the task of validation and verification of embedded software complex and challenging. In addition to the component testing, integration testing imposes even tougher requirements for software testing. To meet these challenges dSPACE is continuously evolving the Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) technology to provide a systematic way to manage this task. The paper presents developments in the HIL hardware technology with latest quad-core processors, FPGA based I/O technology and communication bus systems such as Flexray. Also presented are developments of the software components such as advanced user interfaces, GPS information integration, real-time testing and simulation models. This paper provides a real-world example of implication of integration testing on HIL environment for Chassis Controls.

The technological development in the field of automotive electronics is proceeding at almost break-neck speed. The functions being developed and integrated into cars are growing in complexity and volume. With the increasing number and variety of sensors and actuators, electronics have to handle a greater amount of data, and the acquisition and generation of I/O signals is also growing in complexity, for example, in engine management applications. Moreover, intelligent and complex algorithms need to be processed in a minimum of time. This all intensifies the need for Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP), a proven method of decisively speeding up the model-based software development process of automotive electronic control units (ECUs) [1],[2]. All these demanding tasks, including connecting sensors and actuators to the RCP system, need to be performed within a standard prototyping environment.

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing is used by commercial vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in several fields of electronics development. HIL tests are a part of the standard development process for engine and machine control systems. For electronic control units (ECUs), not only the HIL test of the hardware but also the controller software validation is very important. For hardware diagnostics validation, a dynamic simulation of the real system could be omitted and an open-loop test of the controller is sufficient in most cases. For most controller software validation including OBD (on-board diagnosis) tests, detailed but real-time capable models have to be used. This article describes the needs and challenges of models in hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) based testing, taking into account the wide range of commercial and off-highway vehicles.

The development of perception functions for tomorrow’s automated vehicles is driven by enormous amounts of data: often exceeding a gigabyte per second and reaching into the terabytes per hour. Data is typically gathered by a fleet of dozens of mule vehicles which multiply the data generated into the hundreds of petabytes per year. Traditional methods for fueling data-driven development would record every bit of every second of a data logging drive on solid-state drives located on a PC in the vehicle. Recorded data must then be exported from these drives using an upload station which pushes to the data lake after arriving back at the garage. This paper considers different techniques for curating logged data.

Model-based software development and automatic code generation have become increasingly established in recent years. The automotive industry has widely adopted and successfully deployed these methods in many different series production programs worldwide. This brought various benefits, such as a reduction in development times, improved quality due to more precise specifications, and early verification and validation by means of simulation. At the same time, more and more safety-related and safety-critical systems have been - and will be -introduced into modern vehicles. Common examples are active front steering, adaptive cruise-control, and integrated chassis control. This leads to the question, if and how model-based design and automatic production code generation can be applied to the development of safety-critical systems.

Today, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation is common practice as a testing methodology for electronic control units (ECUs). An essential criterion for the efficiency of an HIL system is the availability of powerful test automation having access to all of its hardware and software components (including I/O channels, failure insertion units, bus communication controllers and diagnostic interfaces). The growing complexity of vehicle embedded systems, which are interconnected by bus systems (like CAN, LIN or FlexRay), result in hundreds or even thousands of tests that have to be done to ensure the correct system functionality. This is best achieved by automated testing. Automated testing usually is performed by executing tests on a standard PC, which is interconnected to the HIL system. However, higher demands regarding timing precision are hard to accomplish. As an example, ECU interaction has to be captured and responded to in the range of milliseconds.

This paper describes a new production code generator that meets both the requirements of code developers for efficient and reliable production code, as well as the desire of system engineers to establish a control design process based on simulation models that double as executable specifications for the ECU software. The production code generator supports automatic scaling, generates optimized fixed-point C code for microcontrollers like the Motorola 683xx, Siemens C16x, and Hitachi SH-2, and produces ASAP2 [1] calibration information. Benchmark results show that the autogenerated code can match or even exceed the efficiency of typical handwritten production code. Code quality is assured by design and by systematic, automatic, and extremely comprehensive test procedures.

Because of the rapidly increasing amount of electronic components and busses in a vehicle, the use of gateways in Electronic Control Units (ECUs) becomes more important. The upcoming question is how to design an optimal gateway. This paper describes a method for designing an optimal automotive gateway in an FPGA by using Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). The complete gateway functionality is diagrammed in a specification graph which consists of a function graph and an architecture graph. The function graph describes the complete functionality of the gateway. The architecture graph shows the variety of the different implementation options of the mapped function graph. Each gateway task in the function graph can be realized either in a parallel way (different kinds of hardware implementations) or in a sequential way (software on a microprocessor core).

This paper will first introduce and classify the basic principles of architecture-driven software development and will briefly sketch the presumed development process. This background information is then used to explain extensions which enable current behavior modeling and code generation tools to operate as software component generators. The generation of AUTOSAR software components using dSPACE's production code generator TargetLink is described as an example.

Function models have a well-established position in automotive software development. Formal system models, on the other hand, are rare. This article describes the various aspects of function and system models, focusing mainly on AUTOSAR-compatible models. It also depicts the challenges for future overall models that combine the function models and the system model, and the resulting benefits, such as early system verification via PC-based simulations.

The application of a communication infrastructure for hybrid test systems is currently a topic in the aerospace industry, as also in other industries. One main reason is flexibility. Future laboratory tests means (LTMs) need to be easier to exchange and reuse than they are today. They may originate from different suppliers and parts of them may need to fulfill special requirements and thus be based on dedicated technologies. The desired exchangeability needs to be achieved although suppliers employ different technologies with regard to specific needs. To achieve interoperability, a standardized transport mechanism between test systems is required. Designing such a mechanism poses a challenge as there are several different types of data that have to be exchanged. Simulation data is a prominent example. It has to be handled differently than control data, for example. No one technique or technology fits perfectly for all types of data.

In open jet wind tunnels with high blockage ratios a sharp rise in drag is observed for models approaching the nozzle exit plane. The physical background for this rise in drag will be analyzed in the paper. Starting with a basic analysis of the dependencies of the effect on model and wind tunnel properties, the key parameters of the problem will be identified. It will be shown using a momentum balance and potential flow theory that interaction between model and nozzle exit can result in significant tunnel-induced gradients at the model position. In a second step, a CFD-based investigation is used to show the interaction between nozzle exit and a bluff body. The results cover the whole range between open jet and closed wall test section interaction. The model starts at a large distance from the nozzle, then moves towards the nozzle, enters the nozzle and is finally completely inside the nozzle.

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing is indispensable in the software development process for control units and has been an integral part of the software development process for years. Large HIL systems for integration tests are used to test the correct behavior of distributed functions and the communication between the control units. The vast development programs that are involved require building duplicates of such test systems or parts of them, due to the fact that the tasks are distributed between different companies or different departments within a company. However, there is an alternative to duplicating a test system. Instead of using a cloned system, coupling HIL systems over large distances is an alternate approach. This paper presents what requirements this coupling must fulfill and and describes a path-breaking method to fulfill them. In addition, results of an implementation are shown.