A Virtual Prototyping Platform for Exploration of Vehicular Electronics

A critical requirement for robust, optimized, and secure design of vehicular systems is the ability to do system-level exploration, i.e., comprehend the interactions involved among electronic control units (ECUs), sensors, and communication interfaces in realizing system-level use cases and the impact of various design choices on these interactions. This must be done early in the system design to enable the designer to make optimal design choices without requiring a cost-prohibitive design overhaul. In this article, we develop a virtual prototyping environment for the modeling and simulation of vehicular systems. Our solution, ViVE, is modular and configurable, allowing the user to conveniently introduce new system-level use cases. Unlike other related simulation environments, our platform emphasizes coordination and communication among various vehicular components and just the abstraction of the necessary computation of each ECU. We discuss the ability of ViVE to explore the interactions between a number of realistic use cases in the automotive domain. We demonstrate the utility of the platform, in particular, to create real-time in-vehicle communication optimizers for various optimization targets. We also show how to use such a prototyping environment to explore vehicular security compromises. Furthermore, we showcase the experimental integration and validation of the platform with a hardware setup in a real-time scenario.