WEX-HIL: Design of a Wireless Extensible hardware-in-the-loop real-time simulator for electric vehicle applications

A real-time simulator is an essential tool for swiftly designing and verifying embedded time-sensitive and/or real-time applications in both academia and industry. An FPGA-based wireless extensible hardware-in-the-loop (WEX-HIL) real-time simulator was developed for designing subsystems of an electrical vehicle (EV). The WEX-HIL platform is capable of providing a design and test environment of virtual and real embedded system prototypes for academic research and education. The WEX-HIL platform permits a relatively quick turnaround time for software model development. The FPGA-based virtual hardware prototyping is also effectively done with the WEX-HIL platform by interfacing software models executing in the baseline real-time simulator with the virtual prototypes. Furthermore, the proposed real-time simulation platform provides a user friendly GUI-based model development environment with the commercial software IDEs from high-level to low-level and with the hardware IDEs from simulation to synthesis. The WEX-HIL platform particularly offers an ample means of integrating software and hardware models and virtual and real prototypes via high-speed wire and flexible wireless communications. The WEX-HIL real-time simulation achieved 2.89% of distance error accuracy with the sensing system, 2.5× faster acceleration and 0.3% HIL simulation error, the 50 μs responding timing constraints, and intuitive intra and inter model and prototype integration at different abstract levels in SIL and HIL real-time simulations. With the WEX-HIL platform, a comprehensive hands-on multi-inter-disciplinary course in Electrical and Computer Engineering was created and offered. The course comprises a series of the subjects for successful designing and utilizing the WEX-HIL platform and related applications in Computer, Communication, Electrical and Power-Electronics Engineering. Hands-on laboratories equipped with hardware/software design tools were also developed for further experiments of current and emerging applications in the embedded and real-time systems. The proposed course is expected to alleviate the technology gap developed and utilized between industry and academia.