Verification by Simulation Within the Model-Based Development Process at Continental Automotive Group's Engine Systems Business Unit

The integrated development environment System Design Automation (SDA) at Continental Automotive Group’s Engine Systems business unit supports model-based function development (MBD) in the field of increasingly complex electronic control unit (ECU) structures and supports developers throughout the function development process. Model-based testing and test engineering have taken a larger and larger role, especially in the context of safety-relevant software and ISO 26262.

Based on PC simulation, models can be verified in an early step in addition to pure formal verification and before using further enhanced and hardware-based methods like rapid prototyping. An important point at this time in development is the traceability from requirement to the solution and its test and vice versa. The central topic for function and software engineers who are fulfilling all these tasks is to get guidance through the huge amount of functionalities offered in the commercial standard tools.

The Engine Systems business unit therefore integrated into the SDA environment an MBD test suite, which is based on MATLAB, Simulink, and Stateflow. The central part of the test suite is represented by the simulation manager. This central graphical user interface has been extended in-house and covers the generation of new test cases, the reuse of existing test cases, and test case execution.

This session explains the function of the MBD test suite as an XML-based test plan, specification, and report and shows how the model-based function development is supported by the simulation manager. It presents how the simulation manager makes full use of SDA’s closed workflow from the “golden model” representing the physical algorithm down to the generated code. All testing and validation tasks can be done based on PC simulation or by the means of different rapid prototyping methods and are seamlessly integrated in the development process. In addition, the generation of test vectors out of the golden model leads to test vector objects, which can be efficiently reused by downstream steps of the development process.

Using the simulation manager and the MBD test suite optimizes the efficiency of the daily tasks of the function development process in the Engine Systems business unit at Continental Automotive Group by giving a direct relationship between requirement engineering, test planning and specification, and test implementation, either based on Simulink or based on measurements and test execution and report. This results in a very high quality of modeled functionality. This integration makes it possible to further optimize the execution of the downstream activities in the verification cycle, such as production code generation, integration, and documentation.