Review on Hardware-in-Loop Simulation used to Advance Design Efficiency and Test Competency

In the Automotive Industry, product management has never been an easy task. It is becoming more complex because of increasingly intricate vehicle functionalities, lack of fool-proof verification and validation processes, inability to perform extensive validation of features versus actual vehicle performance, non access to actual vehicle for verifying performance characteristics. The challenges are going to increase with hardware obsolescence / migration. Automotive electronic systems are becoming truly distributed to achieve increased system functionality by tightly coupling Electronic Control Units (ECUs). These changes encourage a significantly revised approach to automotive system test. The fundamental functional design approach has been modular and ECU-centric, but the ECU count has steadily increased. The next big shift is to achieve functionality through the integration of multiple ECUs. Nowadays, model-based formal verification approaches are mostly used for benchmarking automotive electronic systems. However, these approaches unable to check the system for bus errors, faulty hardware configurations and compatibility problems efficient. Solution for this is the Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) test. HiL allows testing embedded software or prototypes or final electronic components, to test design against a real time dynamic environment without the real plant. This paper provides a brief overview of the HiL simulation and its applications.