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Nowadays, technology advances have been growing exponentially, creating many branches of possibilities for new products and ways to improve the ones that are already on the market. These new possibilities have been used in the automotive industry to increase efficiency, quality, robustness of their products and also to introduce several functionalities that were not possible before. As result, project complexity is also exponentially increasing. On this context, several tools, techniques and processes have been developed and used to guarantee the quality and robustness of their products, while minimizing development time in order to stay competitive at the market. Considering this context, the use of Hardware In The Loop systems (HIL) is increasing, due to its flexibility, reliability and representativeness that have been verified over time for verification and validation activities using Electronic Control Modules.

The automotive industry is one of the most strict and demanding industries when it comes to the safety and quality of its products. One of the cornerstones in order to achieve such demands is to have high reliability of its powertrain controls software developed using the V-Cycle methodology. With the V-Cycle approach, it is essential to verify and validate every step of the software development process such as requirements elicitation, code development and prototyping, all this being done before the actual software can be tested on the vehicle. This process is of extreme importance but it comes with the downside of increased project cost and timing. An alternative and solution to the increase in project cost and timing is the use of Hardware-In-the-Loop simulators. The HIL is a powerful tool that has the capability of running real-time simulations of a full vehicle. In order to achieve this, it makes use of high fidelity models with a low error margin compared to real vehicles.

The advance of technology and the demand for new features on vehicles has been challenging the automotive industry to find ways to speed up its development process, while increases the robustness and quality of its products. On this context, the embedded software development for vehicles has been directly impacted. In other words, the number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) considerably increased on the past few years and the number of lines of code, as well as their complexity, have been exponentially increased. In order to deal with this new reality, besides the automotive test prototypes used during the development, the automotive industry has been using different virtual environment to develop, verify and validate its products.

The automotive industry has been facing a great challenge on the current market. With the rapid advance of technology and the growth complexity of its projects, one question comes up: how to speed up development time, while increasing options for the products, maintaining the quality and keeping the competitiveness at the same time? The answer for this question is not easy and can include several decisions and actions in the whole development process. In this context, partial system virtualization, or even a complete virtualization of systems included in a vehicle, can be used as an important tool to help answer the mentioned question. In other words, the usage of modeled components can help decrease the development time and increase product quality. Besides, this virtualization can be used on different steps during the development of new products or even for the maintenance of those already on the market.