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GM's R oad-to- L ab-to- M ath (RLM) initiative is a fundamental engineering strategy leading to higher quality design, reduced structural cost, and improved product development time. GM started the RLM initiative several years ago and the RLM initiative has already provided successful results. The purpose of this paper is to detail the specific RLM efforts at GM related to powertrain controls development and calibration. This paper will focus on the current state of the art but will also examine the history and the future of these related activities. This paper will present a controls development environment and methodology for providing powertrain controls developers with virtual (in the absence of ECU and vehicle hardware) calibration capabilities within their current desktop controls development environment.

Recent economic conditions have pushed both automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Tier1 suppliers to reevaluate the way that they are spending not only their money, but also their precious engineering resources. This reevaluation has caused a focus on core engineering activities and a push to reuse capital equipment, such as development tools. This reevaluation has also caused users of embedded controls development tools to actively seek out commercially available development tool solutions when such solutions are available and even to push commercial tool vendors to develop solutions when they don't yet exist.

Today's powertrain control systems are not only quite complex, but often powertrain calibration engineers must effectively deal with many conflicting design goals. This calibration process typically involves resolving many differing calibration trade-offs as well as multiple time-consuming iterations comparing differing calibration scenarios and their respective effects on the overall system performance. By providing powertrain calibration engineers with a tool specifically designed to streamline this time consuming task, overall powertrain calibration efficiency and productivity can be greatly improved. The end result for the powertrain manufacturer is faster time to market and better product quality since additional time is made available for more thorough prove-out and testing.