To increase their testing capabilities, provide faster time to market, and enable development and validation of software-defined vehicles (SDV), General Motors has decided to create a completely virtual environment, which can provide a test interface similar to a physical test system. The idea is to create a digital twin of every piece of electronics in the vehicle, so that the entire electronic content of the vehicle can be simulated in a computing cluster, which can be executed both on bare-metal machines for manual testing, but also in a cloud environment especially for regression-based testing. To realize their virtual integration testing environment, General Motors is working jointly with dSPACE and KPIT, to bring the product expertise of dSPACE in virtual ECU testing together with the automotive software engineering expertise of KPIT, to realize a completely virtual, cloud-capable, scalable development and integration testing environment.  

The platform is called SOLE and integrates all major feature components related to orchestrating and executing a vehicle-level software integration test setup.  

• A Virtual ECU is co-simulated. 
• The appropriate plant models are integrated into the platform via various co-simulation means.
• All necessary test tooling infrastructure is in place so that access to the simulator is made possible, via various interface APIs.  
• Orchestration and deployment to the cloud are made possible using a variety of techniques.
• Standards-based tooling makes the platform available for all necessary measurement and data recording needs.

VEOS, the software-in-the-loop (SIL) and V-ECU integration solution from dSPACE, plays a central role in this. It enables software innovation in all domains to be driven forward and validated across domains in early phases of vehicle software development. This shortens the time to market for valuable software functions.

Courtesy of General Motors.

dSPACE MAGAZINE, PUBLISHED JUNE 2023