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The application of Model-Based Development (MBD) techniques for automotive control system and software development have become standard processes due to the potential for reduced development time and improved specification quality. In order to improve development productivity even further, it is imperative to introduce a systematic Verification and Validation (V&V) process to further minimize development time and human resources while ensuring control specification quality when developing large complex systems. Traditional methods for validating control specifications have been limited by control specification scale, structure and complexity as well as computational limitations restricting their application within a systematic model-based V&V process. In order to address these issues, Toyota developed Hierarchical Accumulative Validation (HAV) for systematically validating functionally structured executable control specifications.

Model-Based Development (MBD) has become an automotive industry standard process in vehicle control systems development due to the potential to reduce development time and improve engineering quality. This has become even more important as control systems are becoming increasingly complex while development cycle timelines shorten. Toyota utilized Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulations (HILS) techniques when developing the latest Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle, FCHV-adv. These MBD techniques contributed to the overall development process, but applications were limited to verifying control specifications. It was recognized that if MBD could be utilized beyond its current role in the control system design process to include functional specification validation, specification quality could be improved while decreasing development time and cost.