Simulation-based Design for Electric Vehicles – Design environment E-Mobil

The electrification of power trains lead to manifold challenges: The complexity of control devices and control algorithms has risen tremendously. Experience in designing control device software for electric vehicles has to be expanded, e.g. in optimizing energy efficiency. Usually, costly and time consuming research on testing benches and prototypes are necessary. It is therefore hard for companies to step foot in this new market.

This project is about a design environment that enables companies to do many of their tests solely simulation-based and virtual at an early point in time during the development process. This design environment enables the user to test control- and optimization strategies for any type of vehicle across multiple domains. Expenditures for test benches and prototypes can therefore be reduced, design-loops avoided and the operating efficiency of the development process be increased.

Simulation-based design of automotive software is the successor of model-based software design. One of the most important aspects of model-based design is giving the engineer the option to exactly and intuitively describe solutions in the selected domain. Within the domain of automotive software, model constructs for solving control tasks, e.g. similar to what is supplied by Matlab/Simulink, qualify for this. The program code is produced by the code generator of the model.

The AUTOSAR standard simplifies the integration of software on distributed control units within the car by defining coherent interfaces and joint data exchange. That is why this project focusses on the design and simulation-based evaluation of AUTOSAR-compliant control device software.

In this project, C-LAB focuses on the interface between control- and software design and develops a domain-spanning design methodology. Questions such as how to optimize information- and data exchange between the control devices and the software across the natural borders of the model. Realization of the methodical approach within the design environment is the other main focus of the project. In order to be able to perform simulations in the early phases of development, all the necessary information for the simulation run has to be supplied by design environment, e.g. the relay of the software that is sumulated has to be possible with the help of environment models.

Project funded by: NRW/EU
Project duration: 11/2010 bis 10/2013

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