Search Results

The key to increase efficiency in electronic control unit (ECU) development is seen today in a common parts strategy. It has the goal to use a once developed ECU in more than one product series. While for a lot of control units communality is just a matter of contained functionality, for such with visible surfaces reuse is prevented by design criteria. Exemplarily, with the roof controller from the BMW 3 series, possibilities are shown in this article how communality can still be achieved. Building blocks on different abstraction levels will be introduced as the communal parts. One will be found on circuit level. The prerequisites to communal software will be explained. By use of model based software the concept of model library will support the concepts for communality. This leads to a new business process.

This paper presents a methodology for tool-assisted development of software for electronic control units in cars. Because of increasing complexity the developer requires a set of tools that cover the whole development process. In this paper the process is separated into several phases. Ideally after analysis there is a specification phase, where executable but hardware independent models are created. After that in the Design phase the hardware architecture is designed and partitioning of the models onto the network of ECUs is performed. Here the appropriate architecture is chosen. This paper shows the seamless methodology from the Specification phase tool ‘ASCET-SD’ to the Design phase tool ‘Virtual Component Co-Design’ (VCC) with respect to the overall design flow. Several ways of doing the transition considering intellectual property protection, target dependency accordingly independency, and model semantics are considered.