Functional Model-Based Design Methodology for Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems

The high complexity of cross-domain engineering in combination with the pressure for system innovation, higher quality, time to market, and budget constraints makes it imperative for automotive companies to use integrated engineering methods and tools. Computer engineering tools are mainly focused on a particular domain, and therefore, it is difficult to integrate different tools for system-level analysis. In this paper, a novel multidisciplinary systems engineering methodology and associated design automation algorithms for the complex automotive cyber-physical systems are presented. Rather than starting from the domain-specific architecture/simulation models where most resources are spent, we preemptively target the early design stage at the functional level that determines 75% of an automobile's cost. In our methodology, the marriage of systems engineering principles with high-level synthesis techniques from design automation area results in a functional modeling compiler capable of generating high-fidelity simulation models for the design space exploration and validation of multiple cyber-physical automotive architectures. Using real-world automotive use cases, we demonstrate how functional models capturing integrated cyber-physical aspects are synthesized into high-fidelity multidomain simulation models.