Advanced automated onboard vehicle diagnostics testing

This paper presents new methodology and tool development for automated onboard vehicle diagnostics testing based on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) test specification for services, communication and software download implementation. Automated diagnostic testing of Electronic Control Unit (ECU), which is performed in Virtual Integration and Test Automation Laboratory (VITAL) environment at Jaguar Land Rover, is systematic, exhaustive, as well as reliable in nature. Automated Vehicle Diagnostics (AVD) provides efficient way of testing all the diagnostics implemented in ECU, which is otherwise a laborious task to perform manually. AVD ensures detection of failure modes in the diagnostic software during the early stages of the development process. It captures the hidden errors in the diagnostic software and the errors are accurately reproducible for diagnostic software bug fixing. The diagnostics requirements are tested and validated automatically. Features like capture and playback and CAN trace/frames reference to the test report simplify tester analysis. The paper describes the software architecture and its interface in order to perform diagnostics service testing, and presents results of the software implementation using real vehicle data.