Development and Verification of In-Vehicle Networks in a Virtual Environment

Due to the increase in demand for comfort and safety features in today's automobiles, the internal vehicle communication networks necessary to accommodate these features are very complex. These networks represent a heterogeneous architecture consisting of several ECUs exchanging information via bus systems such as CAN, LIN, MOST, or FlexRay buses. Development and verification of internal vehicle networks include multiple design layers. These layers are the logical layer represented by the software application, the associated data link layer, and the physical connection layer containing bus interfaces, wires, and termination. Verification of these systems in the early stages of the design process (before a physical network is available for testing) has become a critical need. As a result, the need to simulate these designs at all their levels of complexity has become critically important. Internal vehicle networks can be simulated on many different abstraction levels using various model levels and modeling technologies. Early in the development process, analyses can be performed without having available any detailed models from the chip manufacturer or component supplier. Later in the development process, more accurate models can be integrated into the simulation process, including those provided by suppliers and chip manufacturers. This paper demonstrates a portion of the development and verification process of the physical layer of an internal vehicle CAN bus at Volkswagen using the Saber simulation environment. This paper also demonstrates the integration of portions of the logical layer into simulation so both logical and physical layers can be analyzed together.