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Automotive vehicles today consist of very complex network of electronic control units (ECU) connected with each other using different network implementations such as Controller Area Network (CAN), FlexRay, etc. There are several ECUs inside a vehicle targeting specific applications such as engine, transmission, body, steering, brakes, infotainment/navigation, etc. comprising on an average more than 50 ECUs executing more than 50 million lines of software code. It is expected to increase exponentially in the next few years. Such complex electric/electronic (E/E) architecture and software calls for a comprehensive, flexible and systematic development and validation environment especially for a system level or vehicle level development. To achieve this goal, we have built a virtual multi-ECU high fidelity cyber-physical multi-rate cosimulation that closely resembles a realistic hardware based automotive embedded system.

The underlying theories of both control engineering and real-time systems engineering assume idealized system abstractions that mutually neglect central aspects of the other discipline. Control engineering theory, on the one hand, usually assumes jitter free sampling and constant input-output latencies disregarding complex real-world timing effects. Real-time engineering theory, on the other hand, uses abstract performance models that neglect the functional behavior, and derives worst-case situations that have little expressiveness for control functionalities in physically dominated automotive systems. As a consequence, there is a lot of potential for a systematic co-engineering between both disciplines, increasing design efficiency and confidence. We have taken a standard control-engineering tool, Simulink, and combined it with state-of-the-art real-time system design and analysis tools, SymTA/S and TraceAnalyzer from Symtavision.

Ethernet is the hottest candidate for future in-car communication architecture, promising much higher bandwidth, flexibility and reduced costs. In the coming years, Ethernet will likely evolve from a separate communication medium for special applications like surround-view cameras and infotainment to a central communication infrastructure as a backbone technology. To make this transition, many difficult design decisions have to be made in order to make the technology suitable for the stricter time and safety requirements of todays and future cars. There are a lot of potential real-time effects that must be taken into account. To guide these design decisions, it is necessary to analyze the various architecture concepts with respect to load, performance and real-time capabilities. In this paper, we present different design space axes of Ethernet and propose a methodology of assessing and comparing them.

The topic of timing has already been recognized as a major challenge when designing safety-critical automotive architectures. Consequently the availability of appropriate performance and timing analysis methods is key to building reliable automotive electric and electronics (E/E) and software architectures. Due to the potential performance increase, power reduction and cost-efficiency multicore solutions for automotive real-time environments receive growing attention. But the prediction of the timing behavior for multicore electronic control unit (ECU) systems becomes more complicated. Even in setups with static task-to-processor mapping, the execution of the tasks is usually not independent. The use of the same physical hardware, such as memories, coprocessors, or network components, makes inter-core interference unavoidable and may introduce hard-to-find timing problems including missed deadlines that can finally make the entire system fail.