Virtualization of Vehicular Electronics for System-level Exploration

Published in
IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference, IEEE International Workshop on Automotive Reliability, Test and Safety, and IEEE Internet of Things Journal 

A critical requirement for robust, optimized, and secure design of vehicular systems is the ability to do system-level exploration, i.e., comprehend the interactions involved among ECUs, sensors, and communication interfaces in realizing system-level use cases and the impact of various design choices on these interactions. This must be done early in the system design to enable the designer to make optimal design choices without requiring a cost-prohibitive design overhaul. In this paper, we develop a virtual prototyping environment for the modeling and simulation of vehicular systems. Our solution, VIVE, is modular and configurable, allowing the user to conveniently introduce new system-level use cases. Unlike other related simulation environments, our platform emphasizes coordination and communication among various vehicular components and just the abstraction of the necessary computation of each electronic control unit. We discuss the ability of VIVE to explore the interactions between a number of realistic use cases in the automotive domain.

Our work derives inspiration from the progress above in digital twins as well as virtual platforms and targets them toward developing a focused prototyping solution for automotive systems