Simulation and Validation of Component-based Automotive Control Software

The validation of functional and real-time requirements of automotive control software usually needs the electronic control unit and the controlled hardware components. But very often, the electronic control unit and the hardware components are not available for testing the automotive control software in the early development phases. This paper presents a validation process for component-based automotive control software in earlier development phases. The validation of the component-based control software is made on the simulated dynamic behaviour of the control system. The dynamic behaviour is monitored by the events, which are communicated between the black box components, during simulation. These events are recorded with time stamps and compared offline against the required sequences of events. The required sequences of events are gathered with an use case analysis and are transferred in extended UML sequence diagrams to enable a toolbased offline comparison. The offline comparison validates the simulated dynamic behaviour or detects contradictions, which have to be removed by the developer. A case study about the development and validation of an automotive wiper control system demonstrates the capacity of the presented validation process.