ECU DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING THROUGH NUMERICAL OPTIMIZATION AND HARDWARE IN THE LOOP SIMULATIONS

A method to speed up and improve the whole development cycle of Electronic Control Units (ECU) is presented.

The proposed procedure can be divided into three steps:

• development and validation of the controlled system dynamic model;
• numerical optimisation of the system control strategy;
• Hardware In the Loop (HIL) simulations to test the electronic control unit.

Implementation of the method has led to the creation of a hardware in the loop system aimed at testing the control unit of electronically controlled transmissions. The system includes a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) board where the dynamic model runs and a console allowing the user to operate the throttle and brake pedals and to actuate the gearshifts. The behaviour of the model can be visualised through a real time Graphical User Interface (GUI) on a PC connected with the DSP board by a serial link.