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Automotive electric and electronic (E/E) systems are key drivers for innovation in today's vehicles. While new functions are delivering eco-friendliness (hybrid and pure electric vehicles, etc.), assistance/comfort (drive-by-wire, park-assist, etc.) and active safety (electronic stability control, lane-change-assist, brake-assist, etc.) their inherent complexity is challenging manufacturers and suppliers. At the same time, functional safety of the product is a key issue: During the whole car's product life cycle, there are many potential risks for physical injuries, or even worse, fatalities. Therefore, these potential sources of harm should strictly be avoided. In this work, we focus on a powerful method for verification and validation activities during early phases of the development, namely simulation. Simulation is one of the main methods for verification stated by the functional safety standard ISO 26262.

Within this work we demonstrate the implementation and evaluation of a vehicle-to-vehicle based intersection assistance system, relying only on communication between the vehicles and not requiring any communication with infrastructural components as it is the case with typical complex intersection assistance systems. It also requires no additional information like right-of-way or maps and works out-of-the-box for nearly all types of intersections. The intersection assistance system utilizes GPS, yaw rate, vehicle acceleration, speed and heading as indicators for a 3D path prediction. While the x-y layer aids in the detection of possible collisions, the z axis is used for detecting bridges and overpasses. By applying several sophisticated filter levels and algorithms, the amount of false positives can massively be reduced while the true positives can be maintained. Finally, the developed simple intersection assistance system is compared to a sophisticated intersection assistance system.

With the huge improvements made during the last years in the area of integrated safety systems, they are one of the main contributors to the massively rising complexity within automotive systems. However, this enormous complexity stimulates the demand for methodologies supporting the efficient development of such systems, both in terms of cost and development time. Within this work, we propose a co-simulation-based approach for the validation of integrated safety systems. Based on data measurements gained from a test bed, models for the sensors and the distributed safety system are established. They are integrated into a co-simulation environment containing models of the ambience, driving dynamics, and the crash-behavior of the vehicle. Hence, the complete heterogeneous system including all relevant effects and dependencies is modeled within the co-simulation.

Functional safety of automotive embedded systems is a key issue during the development process. To support the industry, the automotive functional safety standard ISO 26262 has been defined. However, there are several limitations when following the approach directly as defined in the standard. Within this work, we propose an approach for the integration and test of safety-critical systems by using system modeling techniques. The combination of two state-of-the-art modeling languages into a dedicated multi-language development process provides a direct link between all stages of the development process, thus enabling efficient safety verification and validation already during modeling phase. It supports the developer in efficient application of requirements as defined by ISO 26262, hence reducing development time and cost by providing traceable safety argumentation.

Efficient integration of mechanics and microelectronics components is nowadays a must within the automotive industry in order to minimize integration risks and support optimization of the entire system. We propose in this work a cross domain co-simulation platform for the efficient analysis of mechatronic systems. The interfacing of two state-of-the-art simulation platforms provides a direct link between the two domains at an early development stage, thus enabling the validation and optimization of the system already during modeling phase. The proposed cross-domain co-simulation is used within our TEODACS project for the analysis of the FlexRay technology. We illustrate using a drive-by-wire use case how the different architecture choices may influence the system.

One main challenge during the validation of automotive communication architectures is to consider the assembled system and more especially the interactions between the different components. We propose in this work a test and validation infrastructure based on tightly coupled co-simulation and prototype platforms. The co-simulation framework, on one hand, enables the efficient simulation of the entire network and the accurate analysis of the communication at different abstraction layers. On the other hand, the prototype framework is required for the model calibration and for the system validation on a realistic environment. We discuss further how the interconnection of these two platforms supports the analysis of both single components and entire communication networks. Experimental results illustrate our approach.