Concept of Virtual Engine Control Module for High Quality and Time Efficient Verification and Testing of Powertrain Engine Control Module

Wide varieties of vehicle Engine Management Systems are designed by different Tier#1 suppliers to meet highly complex requirements with the help of electronics. Emerging technologies and features of Engine Management Systems require a number of strategies for reducing the overall timing for verification with high quality testing. Analysis and decoding of data especially for highly critical and complex such as gasoline direct injection (GDi) engine fuel delivery output, high pressure fuel pump (HPFP), spark control output and different varieties of engine position signals are time consuming. This paper introduces Virtual Engine Control Module (VECM) technology to solve the problem of decoding complex signals and high level verification. A proposed test bench setup consists of VECM, ECM, simulator and real actuator load with complete software flashed inside the ECM. VECM is a measurement-based embedded product that works in complete synchrony with the ECM to generate simple basis signals in correlation with complex output of the ECM. VECM can solve two very complex problems present in powertrain controller verification and testing. First, analysis and decoding of data for a single complex output signal. Second, analysis and decoding of all engine-synchronous or task-synchronous complex output signals with multiple dependencies.