Research And Implementation Of VFB Simulation Environment For Automotive Software Development

In recent years, electronic products have played a more important role in automotive industry, whose hardware and software are more and more complicated. More than a simple control program on an electronic controller, automotive software is a complete system containing many functions. The development of software is faced with a heterogeneous embedded environment. So, the development of in-vehicle systems usually has a longer cycle and the test and validation of system are done with hardware at the end of the developing process. If the design has errors in early stage, it will prolong the circle time of the development. To solve the cross and dependent relationship between software layer and hardware layer, and make the parallel development between software and hardware possible, the OEM put forward the Automotive Open System Architecture(AUTOSAR).As the core concepts of AUTOSAR, the virtual function bus(VFB) is the abstraction of the AUTOSAR software components interconnections of the entire vehicle. It makes the design of the system lie on the abstraction layer, instead of considering the actual hardware environment. The communication between the software can be achieved through standard interfaces. On the basis of studying the AUTOSAR standard, especially the VFB specification, this thesis has designed and implemented the prototype of the VFB simulation environment by combining simulation methods of automotive electronics. The prototype implemented in this thesis can real-timely display the running information of the software component and dynamically modify the system data. It can simulate the software system in the early stage. Moreover, it can reduce the risk of redesigning the system caused by the error which is found in the late stage of the system development.The primary contents of the thesis are as follows:(1) A thorough research on the AUTOSAR standards and VFB specification is made. The existing AUTOSAR software development tools, especially the simulation function, are analyzed and a theoretical foundation for VFB simulation environment is established.(2) The simulation methods in automotive electronics are investigated. Based on the software-in-the-loop simulation technology, the demands of the simulation environment are analyzed. Then, the simulation flow and overall architecture are designed.(3) The simulation environment are divided into four modules as project manager, code generation engine, communication and monitor surface and every module is designed in detail. At last, the prototype of the simulation environment is implemented.(4) In this thesis, the basic functions of the prototype are tested. Combining the actual requirements of automotive, an application example is designed and simulated.