Development of a Steer-By-Wire application in MATLAB/Simulink

This report deals with the idea of Functional System Safety (FUSS), which is a part of the DFEA2020 project. This DFEA2020 project is a joint effort between several actors of the automotive industry, including Mecel, to oversee car technologies by 2020. FUSS is building knowledge on the basis of AUTOSAR – an open automotive software architecture and ISO 26262 – an ISO safety related standard for passenger cars. The project aims to develop a steer-by-wire application for a car simulator. To achieve that, MATLAB/Simulink has been chosen by Mecel as the application development tool, in which we designed the steer-by-wire application. We used the state-of-the-art safety mechanisms from the latest AUTOSAR release for data flow protection within the steer-by-wire application. Model-based design allowed us to test the logic of our steer-by-wire application very early in the development process. A first comprehensive set of tests was done in the Simulink simulation environment with the help of recent Mathworks tools; a second test was done post – code generation when the developed software had been integrated to the AUTOSAR platform. This two level testing process proved to be a valuable development asset with respect to ISO 26262 because it allows for early error detection and correction. We documented the lessons learnt regarding the impact of ISO 26262 and AUTOSAR development on the Mecel development processes. Some limitations that we were able to point out include the fact that the ISO 26262 standard leaves room for interpretation. Companies cannot rely on standard metrics to evaluate the relevance of their processes with regard to ISO 26262. Moreover, the tools around ISO 26262, recently pushed to the market, lack maturity. Combined with the fact that the abstraction layer of AUTOSAR brings a lack of global control over the overall system, we felt that a significant effort is needed from the automotive companies in order to tailor their existing processes to be in line with ISO 26262 specifications