Consistent Simulations for Model, Soft- and Hardware-in-the-Loop (MiL/SiL/HiL)
General Topic |
|---|
| Current developments in the automotive and aerospace industry like advanced assistance systems, sophisticated battery management for supporting electric engines, tightened environmental regulations combined with an increased need for reducing costs, lead to more complex systems and to more complex electronic control units for providing the desired functionality. In order to cope with this growing complexity model-based development is increasingly used throughout the development process. The result is a growing number of models used for various purposes. Models for system design are used in the beginning of the development process to check different solutions and to optimize system functionality. Controller models are developed later in the process and are constantly improved to optimize controller functionality with respect to the controlled system. Automatic code generation is commonly used to make the developed controller functionality available to real electronic control units at the end. To support this incremental improvement and the validation of the controller functionality developed in the various development stages, environment models for simulating the behavior of the controlled system are needed (for virtual validation – i.e. model/software-in-the-loop simulations – and for hardware-in-the-loop simulations). These environment models fulfill different purposes and come at different levels of detail. There is therefore a need for best-in-class modeling tools (e.g., physical modeling in Dymola, signal-flow based modeling in Simulink) for specific applications. Creating and providing best-in-class tools and environment models in the different stages of the development process is very labor-intensive. It is therefore helpful to reuse the environment models to enable proven, consistent solutions in different projects and different departments in a company in order to increase productivity and save time by eliminating the duplication of design efforts. Many research and standardization activities are currently underway for coping with the complexities of current and future development and test activities. |
Company |
|---|
| Starting from September 2011 until March 2020 I worked as a product engineer and later on as a product manager for simulation and implementation software tools and as a partner programm manager in the product management department of dSPACE GmbH. dSPACE (digital Signal Processing And Controller Engineering) founded in 1988 laid the foundations for key technologies such as rapid control prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Today the company is the leading producer of engineering tools for developing and testing mechatronic control systems. With a broad portfolio and cutting-edge technology, the company is a respected development partner in the automotive industry, aerospace and industrial automation. |
Task |
|---|
| My responsibilities as a product engineer and product manager in the product management department of dSPACE included the constant monitoring of new developments in the field of modeling and simulation with applications to develop/test embedded controllers in the automotive and aerospace industry. I did that by attending conferences, analyzing patents, working in standardization projects, being in touch with other tool vendors and last but most importantly by discussing the relevance of new developments with customers. The outcomes of these activities were the starting point for the definition of important requirements and necessary changes. In the dSPACE tool chain I was responsible for the requirements engineering and change management of the consistent tool-chain-wide support of the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) Standard (please see dSPACE FMI landing page). Additionally to these development activities I also provided technology information, demonstration projects and marketing material for that topic to the world-wide sales team. Other responsibilities comprised topics like compilers, virtualization and managing the contacts to 3rd-party modeling and simulation tool vendors both on a technical and legal level. |
Gained Experience |
|---|
| I am an expert for questions related to the consistent reuse of models for Model, Software- and Hardware-in-the-Loop use cases. Especially if topics like Hardware-in-the-Loop and real-time are under consideration (please see my presentations at the 10th and 11th Modelica conference as well as the dSPACE FMI webinar). Customer discussions, standardization work in the Modelica Association FMI project and the management of pilot projects for automotive and aerospace use cases (e.g. dSPACE Magazine article) gave me insights into embedded systems, as well as into administrative challenges and boundary conditions for projects. Often it is the case that administrative aspects are overlaying technical issues. I am also familiar with topics like intellectual property protection and I have a comprehensive overview on modeling and simulation tools like Simulink, Modelica based tools like Dymola and other available tools and simulation platforms. I have also gained insides into other advanced topics like hypervisor based virtualization and parallelization based on OpenMP. Internal and external presentations developed my communication and marketing skills. The gained experiences described above and the valuable cooperative work together with my product management colleagues and the colleagues from the product development department improved my requirements engineering and change management skills. If you are interested in my work please see my publications. Please see this link for legal notices. |