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The Aerospace and Defense industry is currently challenged in multiple ways - cost cutting and sequestration on the defense side, and spurt of growth on the commercial aviation side of business. While these are opposing trends, both will impose severe challenges to the management of product development process for both the Air framers and the suppliers. The challenge becomes severe as the innovation expectations become rapid with increases in embedded software content in avionics and the advent of a new category of autonomous ground, marine, and air systems. Clearly, the industry need is to have a product development process that allows for reducing costs, while increasing embedded software quality and thereby product quality even in an iterative development process.

It is not news anymore when somebody talks about increasing software content in today's vehicles, transportation systems and machinery. The software content and complexity has grown so tremendously and rapidly that even the most advanced product/software development techniques leave more to desire in view of evolving product life-cycles, feature content and need for development efficiency. Model-Based Design (MBD) techniques and V-Cycle based development processes address the significant need for managing complexity, and to some extent, efficiency in product development. Further efficiency in the development process can be achieved by enabling virtual validation of software components. The virtual validation environment for software not only has the ability to run the software component as a standalone unit for performance validation, but is also extended to the validation of the performance of the entire embedded software of an ECU, multiple ECUs and the entire system.

The Model-Based Development (MBD) process has been the key enabler of technical advancement. MBD helps manage complexity, while making product development faster by bringing clarity and transparency to the entire product development process, specifically software components. Developing software using MBD has required extensive, sophisticated toolchains, like the ones provided by dSPACE, that allow for efficient rapid controls prototyping, automatic code generation, and advanced validation and verification techniques with hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test systems. MBD is an efficient iterative process that allows engineers to improve quality and deliver on demanding needs of product variants in the current competitive environment. However, the MBD process described commonly using the ‘V-Cycle’ diagram leads to the generation of large volumes of data artifacts and work products. The iterative process, variants and versions of these artifacts lead to even larger amounts of data.

Hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) typically have complex interaction between different powertrain devices and incorporates complex electronic control unit (ECU) network. For the electrified vehicles of the future, comprehensive ECU tests are more necessary than ever before, as the complexity and amount of embedded software increases at a breathtaking speed. The V-cycle is a widely recognized approach in the development of ECUs spanning from offline controller development to the final implementation on production hardware. This paper describes a case study with a focus on electric drive components and electric drive controller development. The V-cycle for motor controller development involving phases control design, rapid control prototyping and target implementation is explained in detail. The model components needed for HEV simulation were selected from dSPACE Automotive Simulation Models (ASM).

User interface and feedback through the Instrument Panel Cluster (IPC) and other devices in the passenger compartment is another measure of customer satisfaction for today's cars. With addition of more visual information content in the vehicle passenger compartment, it is necessary to perform comprehensive tests of this visual content together with the rest of the electronics system. This paper discusses ideas to perform automated IPC testing together with other electronic control units for software verification. Various methods of image processing and applications of techniques such as optical character recognition (OCR) and optical character verification (OCV) are also discussed. Various benefits achieved by using simulation models of vehicle components such as Engine, Transmission and Vehicle Dynamics to simulate realistic test scenarios and behavior of instrument cluster in the test setup are presented.