Technical Paper
Auto-Generated Production Code Development for Ford/Think Fuel Cell Vehicle Programme
2003-03-03
2003-01-0863
Pi Technology and the Ford Motor Company are using MATLAB Simulink/Stateflow model based design and automatic code generation in C, for the main software development for three electronic control units targeted at the Ford Focus fuel cell vehicle. The automatic generation of code for embedded automotive applications offers a number of potential advantages over traditional methods. These include faster development, the avoidance of coding errors and avoiding inconsistencies with the design specification. However, the use of automatically generated code in production-intent safety-related systems requires at least the same standard of validation and verification. If code generation were perfect, one could validate only the design. However, it is impractical to require that the code generator must be validated for all possible input designs. Furthermore it must be assumed that the compiler and the hardware can also introduce faults.