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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.

Software quality is one of the biggest concerns of the automotive industry. Releasing a product with defects and having a recall can have enormous direct and indirect cost for an automotive OEM. In order to improve software quality is not sufficient to only increase the number of tests. It is extremely important to establish more sophisticated tests that can cover corner cases which are not unveiled during normal operation. Typically, corner cases are very difficult to test as those are often only triggered when the underlying hardware fails or the software gets unexpectedly corrupted. How to test those cases, to make sure that the right SW routines are executed and that the system moves back on time to a safe state? Fault-injection methods are typically used to cover a subset of these tests. However, there are quite some limitations on how effective and cost efficient existing methods can be applied for a more extensive coverage.

Recent analysis shows that 90 percent of future innovation in Automotive will be based on electronics, for which a significant amount will be defined in embedded software [11]. The challenge for suppliers and vehicle manufacturers is to develop advanced software applications that offer optimized performance, while providing flexibility and reliability. To deal with the complexity cause by this shift to software defined functionality, the industry is adopting standards like AUTOSAR to provide a predefined interface between the MCU hardware and the software applications. In addition, to support the enhanced capabilities of those applications the industry is moving to more powerful multi-core MCU architectures, offering real-time and fail-safe capabilities. Moving forward, significant challenges will lie in testing the functionality and performance of such software applications running on top of the next generation multi-core architectures.