The use of static vehicle simulators, as a mean of testing and validating the software, is labor intensive, time consuming and error prone. So, the fast pace of the automotive industry pose as a high burden on ECM Software validation and testing due to: 1) increasingly shorter development cycles; 2) rising number of automotive players and; 3) stiffing of the competition, which calls for diminishing engineering costs.
The use of dynamic simulator with automatic test routines helps to approach these issues. Nevertheless, their high cost hinders its widespread use.
This paper will describe a virtual vehicle simulator technique that can potentially expedite and greatly lower the cost of a considering part of the Software testing problem.
As an abstraction model, this virtual simulator can be viewed as if it was a real, hardware based, dynamic simulator, allowing the communized test scripts and programmatic tools and interfaces.