Development of driver assistance systems using virtual hardware-in-the-loop

In today´s cars, more than 50 electronic control units are used to provide safety and to care about the occupants comfort. The development of advanced driver assistance systems is a key role in the automotive domain. It is essential to validate and verify results and to ensure faultless interoperability of the embedded systems. Not uncommonly, the dimensioning of parameters affects safety aspects and changes need to pass expensive test drives. By increasing the density of integration, future control units will be able to handle more functionality associated with less space requirements. Highly integrated systems will open up new possibilities, but challenges, such as security aspects in the final approval process, need to be faced. In example of advanced driver assistance systems, we introduce a methodology, based on the classical `V´-diagram, for the development in an overall virtual environment. By combining rapid prototyping technologies with commercials off-the-shelf, a safe but realistic instrument is given. The concept is shown with the implementation of cruise-control systems and a drowsiness detector.