Editor for Virtual Cars - Configurator for Simulating Electronic Unit Data

Abstract

As testing of car electronics now-a-days requires a vast amount of time and can be very costly, car manufacturers have developed a common technology – the virtual platform. Virtual platforms are fast, executable simulations of the hardware and the environment it evolves in. They can represent an entire system, a subsystem or a set of relevant software development functionalities. So the advantage with the virtual platform is to allow a full software load to be run with accuracy enough to produce the true timing and the true network traffic that the real electronics will experience without having to compromise the real electronics. The virtual platform is conceived by logging communication with a real vehicle. Hence, from the vehicle log a virtual platform can be created using a special converting program. In this thesis a configurator for editing a virtual platform is considered. This means that a program has been written to easily edit, manipulate and change parameters inside a virtual platform. The configurator gives the ability to change the electronic unit types, the communication between the vehicle and the diagnostic application as well as different requests and responses that entail among other things diagnostic trouble codes, parameters and activation codes. These changes are applied with the help of model data, that shows how the virtual platform is built and service data that describes how the communication between a diagnostic system and a physical car is built up.