Functional design and verification of automotive embedded software: An integrated system verification flow

Automotive systems are diverse, extensively interactive, and multi-disciplinary by nature. We propose a flow that integrates the different environments and tools needed for modeling and simulation of sub-components at each abstraction level, namely, Model in the Loop, Model-to-Software in the Loop, Software in the Loop, and Hardware in the Loop. The proposed flow verifies the system at each of these abstraction levels in the automotive domain. We present a systematic methodology and verification flow for a detailed migration procedure between these different abstraction levels to fulfill complicated automotive system requirements. Our flow has been tested using a brake-bywire anti-locking car system use case. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed flow in discovering early incorrect system behavior at each abstraction level. A common graphical test design and generation tool complements the proposed flow at each level to ensure that the generated tests address the same system functionality at each abstraction level and optimizes the cost of test design and generation.