Model Based Development and Auto Testing: A Robust Approach for Reliable Automotive Software Development

Automotive electronics and software is getting complex day by day. More and more features and functions are offered and supported by software in place of hardware. Communication is carried out on the CAN bus instead of hard wired circuits. This architectural transition facilitates lots of flexibility, agility and economy in development. However, it introduces risk of unexpected failures due to insufficient testing and million of possible combinations, which can be created by users during the life time of a product. Model based development supports an effective way of handling these complexities during simulation and also provide oracle for its validation. Based on priorities and type of applications, test vectors can be auto generated and can be used for formal verification of the models. These auto-generated test vectors are valuable assets in testing and can be effectively reused for target hardware (ECU) verification. Moreover, an incremental model and application software development can be validated with the help of a set of pre-recorded test vectors and a set of expected outputs. Thus eliminating any need for manual testing, which is excessive time consuming and expensive, yet not exhaustive. In this paper an approach of model based development has been presented along with a case study on auto testing and revalidation of the incremental model based software development.