Implementation-Conscious Rapid Control Prototyping Platform for Advanced Model-Based Engine Control

In the extremely cost-sensitive and competitive automotive industry, manufacturers and suppliers are constantly searching for means to reduce both time-to-market and development costs. As a kind of solution to satisfy these requirements, Rapid-control prototyping (RCP) has established itself as viable technology, albeit not everywhere yet. One big gap in the development process, however, is the transfer form RCP to a target implementation with all its limitations. This paper presents a new RCP platform, which aims to provide a consistent environment both at the RCP step and at the target code implementation step. To achieve this goal, the proposed prototyping system is designed very similar to the real production ECU as much as possible, and it supports all the features, which are needed in the RCP. This prototyping system strictly adheres to the layered architecture of the final production ECU, and separates the automatically generated part of software, or the application area, from the hand coded area, which generally carefully designed and tested.