Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In automotive software development, testing and validation workloads are often concentrated at the end of the development cycle, leading to delays and late-stage issue discovery. To address this, virtual Electronic Control Units (vECUs) have gained attention for enabling earlier-stage verification. In our previous work, we developed a Level-4 vECU using a hardware-level emulator. However, when simulating multiple vECUs with independent clocks across distributed emulators, we observed poor timing reproducibility due to the lack of explicit synchronization. To solve this, we implemented an integration layer compliant with the functional mock-up interface (FMI), a widely used standard for simulation tool interoperability. The layer enables synchronized simulation between a centralized simulation master and independently running vECUs. We also developed a virtual CAN bus model to simulate message arbitration and validate inter-vECU communication behavior. Simulation results show that our framework correctly reproduces CAN arbitration logic and significantly improves timing reproducibility compared to conventional Linux-based interfaces. To improve simulation performance, the FMI master algorithm was parallelized, resulting in up to 85.2% reduction in simulation time with eight vECUs. These contributions offer a practical solution for synchronizing distributed Level-4 vECUs and lay the groundwork for future cloud-native simulation of automotive systems.
Source: Electronics
Authors: Hyeongrae Kim, Harim Lee, Jeonghun Cho
Institution: Kyungpook National University
Language: English
Subfield: Computational Theory and Mathematics
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
Awards: G3959594421, G4700831490, G5880903685
OpenAlex ID: W4409634450