Towards a more efficient approach to automotive embedded control system development

With current and future demands on automotive embedded control systems for added functionality and decreased time-to-market, greater emphasis is being placed on engineering tools to facilitate electronic control unit (ECU) development. This paper describes the requirements of a tool set that will effectively meet these demands. Software tools that allow graphical specification of control systems and models should permit users to create and simulate target independently and hence reusable plant models and control functions. At the same time, this simulation environment should be compatible with rapid prototyping hardware, as well as support implementation-specific requirements. Support for operating system specific functions is also an essential element for an integrated ECU development platform. Finally, the ECU development tool set must support automatic production code generation. A common development platform creates an environment in which the various engineers can communicate efficiently in a common language where transfer of information and code is uninhibited by the inherent problems of disparate software toots.