Wide-Area Distributed Integrated Test Environments for Distributed Embedded Control System

Embedded control systems such as automotive form large-scale distributed ones which consist of numerous CPUs and devices, including plants and various hardware components. The complexity of such systems has increased for sophisticated control using numerous types of sensor data. Meanwhile, market pressures lead to reducing development periods for the large-scale distributed embedded control systems. A model-based design becomes popular to solve the above problems, especially automotive industries. In this paper, we describe a wide-area distributed integrated test environment based on the model-based design. The key features are communication middleware to enable wide-area distributed test with integrating the programs in widely distributed sites and control program execution with models of multiple abstraction levels in the model-based design. Furthermore, we developed a model agent simulation. Instead of a plant model that might be located and simulated by MATLAB/Simulink in a remote site, a model agent behaves like the model in a local computer. The model agent simulation significantly reduces the test execution time in a prototype evaluation.