Mapping and streamlining the Hardware-in-the-loop process

Abstract

The car industry is in a transition to a new era, where software and electronics plays a significant role. During recent years, software and electronics has increased vastly in cars and new innovations are constantly joining the industry. In order to cope with the fast development and the new innovations of software in cars, the importance of testing these features has become a key factor to succeed. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) is one of these tests that can be made, where software is tested in its hardware. Volvo Cars is one of many companies that works with this process. In the development of these HIL test environments at Volvo Cars, a clear mapping of the process was something that did not exist. Consequently, this thesis includes a mapping over a general HIL test environment process at Volvo Cars. The study was further meant to find solutions to streamline the process by mapping it and searching for important KPIs. Further, tools from the literature were used to support the proposed changes and ideas to streamline the process. The study was made through an abductive approach where the authors used both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect the empirical data within this case study. Furthermore, the authors made several interviews from all different areas within the process to gather all perspectives of the process. The result of this study showed that information sharing and lack of knowledge in the process were the difficulties and that measurements was one of the solutions to gather more knowledge and information about the process.