A Flexible Engine Control Architecture for Model-based Software Development

The fierce competition and shifting consumer demands require automotive companies to be more efficient in all aspects of vehicle development and specifically in the area of embedded engine control system development. In order to reduce development cost, shorten time-to-market, and meet more stringent emission regulations without sacrificing quality, the increasingly complex control algorithms must be transportable and reusable. Within an efficient development process it is necessary that the algorithms can be seamlessly moved throughout different development stages and that they can be easily reused for different applications. In this paper, we propose a flexible engine control architecture that greatly boosts development efficiency. The efficiency improvements are achieved through four key features, namely the separation of target-dependent and target-independent algorithms, the partitioning of the control system at the system-level, the use of hardware I/O blocksets to facilitate system-level automatic coding, and the use of a data pooling concept to simplify signal propagation throughout the architecture layers. With these key features, the architecture supports seamless transitions from a concept to the final implementation stage and allows algorithm reuse and rapid algorithm substitution.