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Figure 2: Virtual BMW cockpit in ControlDesk Next Generation.
BMW
link
®
soon reach their limits. The
development of new functions is
becoming increasingly complex and
therefore involves more work areas
than before. Because development
tasks are distributed across more
teams and departments while time
to market is becoming shorter, tests
in the early development phases
are a must.
Solution for Challenge No. 1:
F-SIL Stations
The current development process
involves three main teams:
Developers of function and appli-
cation software: They provide the
software components (SWCs).
Developers of the basic software:
They provide the basic software
components (BSWCs).
Suppliers: They provide the ECU
hardware prototype.
At a certain point in time, software-
hardware integration starts. Here,
all SWCs and BSWCs are integrated
and loaded onto the ECU prototype.
The next step is comprehensive
hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing.
BMW has introduced a step that
comes before software-hardware
integration: They use a functional
software-in-the-loop (F-SIL) station
to first perform a purely software-
based integration (figure 1). This
makes it possible to test the interac-
tion of the components developed
for function and application soft-
ware early on. The developers can
check each new development state
and correct potential errors right
away. Thanks to these tests and
corrections, the software reaches
a high quality early in the develop-
ment cycle. During the subsequent
integration tests, only a few, easily
identifiable errors occur.
Setup of the F-SIL Stations
BMW chose dSPACE VEOS as the ba-
sis of the F-SIL station, which is the
company’s integration and simula-
tion platform. Because the software-
software integration has to be inde-
pendent of the hardware specifica-
tions of the target platform, the con-
ventional Windows
®
PCs are ideal,
as they are the everyday working
environment at BMW. Another clear
advantage of VEOS is its solid sup-
port of several de facto standards,
such as AUTOSAR and the Func-
tional Mock-up Interface (FMI), and
MATLAB
®
/Simulink
®
. In addition, VEOS
can be easily connected to existing
hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test and
experiment tools, such as dSPACE
ControlDesk
®
Next Generation and
ECU-TEST from TraceTronic. This
connection makes it easy to inte-
grate the F-SIL station into the exist-
ing BMW tool chain.
PAG
>>
dSPACE Magazine 1/2016 · © dSPACE GmbH, Paderborn, Germany ·
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