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Many automotive ECU system issues do not manifest themselves until later in the vehicle product development cycle, despite the extensive testing and stringent validations that the ECU may have gone through. When such a system-level issue is identified, engineers will traditionally rely on the available information collected from logged DTCs and memory dumps to root-cause the issue. They will then develop a solution that will either eliminate the defects in ECU or develop a robust design to mitigate the impact. However, engineers are faced with technical difficulties which include: (a) physical addresses for many RAM variables critical to find the root-cause are subject to change with various releases of software, (b) some variables “come and go” so it is challenging to find out how and when the undesired events happen, and (c) many variables that are needed to identify the root-cause are missing.

An effective methodology for design verification and product validation is always a key to high quality products. As many body control applications are currently implemented across multiple ECUs distributed on one or more vehicle networks, verification and validation of vehicle-level user functions will require availability of both the vehicle networks and multiple ECUs involved in the implementation of the user functions. While the ECUs are usually developed by different suppliers and vehicle networks' infrastructure and communication protocols are normally maintained and developed by the OEM, each supplier will be faced with a similar challenge - the ECU being developed cannot be fully verified and tested until all other ECUs and their communication networks are available in the final development stage.

Selecting a proper implementation method for software timers in automotive body control applications is one of the crucial steps in the process of software development. We found it particularly true when model-based design (MBD) methodology and automatic code generation techniques are utilized. From our past experience and lessons learned, we have noticed that many software defects are primarily due to inappropriate implementation of software timers.

Requirements development and analysis for automotive electronics products have been found to be tremendously challenging to both OEMs and suppliers. Besides ambiguity, incompleteness, conflicts and other pitfalls commonly seen in requirement specifications, in some cases, a requirements document for a new electronics product may even not exist and may need to be developed from scratch. Analysis reveals that generic model-based approaches and toolsets presently available lack support for requirements development while facilitating all other development activities across the entire product development cycle. In this work, we describe a model-based development methodology centering on requirements development, engineering, and management while supporting other development activities including requirements analysis and clarification, rapid prototyping, simulation, verification and validation, automatic code generation, and SIL/HIL testing.

The application of Model-Based Design (MBD) methodology to software development for automotive Electronics Control Units (ECUs) cannot be fully realized without auto-code generation. Auto-code generation does not lend itself directly to projects where carry-over designs and legacy code have to be utilized due to either budgetary limitations or customer requirements. In fact, the majority of existing ECUs still contain only manually-written embedded software and many projects only involve requirement changes and/or added functions. In this case, it is not practical to discontinue the usage of legacy code and create a full model for the purpose of auto-code generation. In this paper, we describe a methodology in which auto-code generation approach is leveraged by creating MATLAB® models just for new features and/or change requests.

The key to effectively applying model-based methodology to the development of real-time embedded systems hinges on creating an executable model composed of graphical representations that correctly and accurately reflect the requirements, functionality, and implementation constraints for the system under development. To achieve such goals, developers face similar technical and engineering challenges to those experienced with a traditional development process. In this paper, we present an architecture-oriented model design methodology aimed at combating these challenges. The methodology involves decomposing the system functionality into a set of smaller and more manageable pieces, assembling these pieces into an integrated model, placing the model in a controllable and maintainable test environment, and resolving any model implementation issues. The methodology described in this paper has been successfully applied to production projects and has proven to be effective.

The ever-increasing complexity and cost of automotive electrical systems are driving the change in automotive electronics development from traditional approaches to model-based methodology and processes. In this paper, we present an effective model-based development process particularly suitable for dealing with changes to existing designs, or “feature change” types of projects, in which the design and implementation procedures are often imposed by constraints due to the mandatory adoptions of legacy code and carryover designs. The new process herein involves creating “executable” requirements and functional models, generating test scenarios and/or cases, using the test cases for clarifying customer requirement specifications, using the clarified test cases for testing at various levels, and verifying the hardware-in-the-loop test results captured from the proprietary automatic test equipment.