You may not have heard of SmartSE, but you must have heard of "Virtual Electronic", that is, "V-ECU", virtual ECU. In 2020, the SmartSE project team of the ProSTEP iViP Association published a white paper, which gave a detailed introduction to the virtual ECU.
The ProSTEP iViP association was established in 1993 from Germany, an old industrial powerhouse. Its headquarter is located in Darmstadt, a city in central and western Germany. It was first jointly established by 38 industrial enterprises and a number of system suppliers. The ProSTEP iViP Association was founded with the motto "Building Leadership in IT-Based Engineering" and its mission "to ensure solutions that meet the real needs of its member organizations, are compatible with each other, and reach international standard requirements".
▲Site photos of the 2023 ProSTEP iViP seminar
At present, members of the ProSTEP iViP Association have covered 17 countries and about 160 companies and organizations, becoming an international professional association composed of leading companies, system suppliers and research institutions in the automotive and aviation industries. The ProSTEP iViP Association is inter-organizational and interdisciplinary. With the concept of "coordinated view of data, process and system", it provides a solid foundation to help members deal with various current technical challenges. In the association's five focus areas, namely process Management, system integration, product data standardization, engineering collaboration and knowledge transfer have all been well reflected.
SmartSE is the product of the ProSTEP iViP Association for nearly 20 years.
SmartSE, the full name of Smart Systems Engineering, is a project team founded by the ProSTEP iViP Association in 2012. The team members come from nearly 30 companies and research institutions to jointly develop application-oriented concepts to overcome common system engineering challenges . SmartSE mainly performs the following tasks:
1. Make suggestions for process design;
2. Promote technical standards for the collaborative development of complex mechatronic systems;
3. Support the establishment of transparency of systems engineering goals within and between companies.
▲SmartSE has played an important role in improving the FMI (Functional Simulation Interface) standard and establishing it as an industry standard for simulation model exchange.
Members of SmartSE include but are not limited to:
In 2021, SmartSE achieved a milestone success, officially released the white paper of the virtual ECU, and in 2022 released the third revision of the intelligent system engineering proposal.
▲Five stages of SmartSE development
In 2023, SmartSE has entered the fifth stage, expanding the focus from bilateral cooperation with multiple partners to joint development with multiple partners. With the mission of "realizing the cooperative development and verification of complex products through simulation on the multi-level supply chain", four major Core topics: simulation (process) quality, dealing with different levels of abstraction when using simulation, the interplay of systems engineering and agile methods, and extensions to the V-model to deal with systems in context and additional lifecycle phases.
The Best Application Tool for Virtual ECU——SkyEye
SkyEye, the Chinese full name of Tianmu all-digital real-time simulation software , is a hardware behavior-level simulation platform based on visual modeling, which supports users to simulate and model hardware at the behavior level by dragging and dropping. SkyEye-based virtual ECU can transfer development tasks from drive test and bench to Windows/Linux PC to realize efficient in-the-loop (SIL) development of ECU software. Engineers can build virtual ECUs that closely emulate real controllers to load and run target binaries in real ECUs.
At the same time, SkyEye virtual ECU builds a powerful experimental environment. Through the multi-domain distributed collaborative simulation platform DigiThread, it can communicate with simulation models (such as power supply models, motors, etc.) model, etc.) for data interaction to simulate and replicate the behavior of physical systems. Before building a physical prototype or conducting bench tests, engineers can verify the system design in advance based on the virtual ECU to minimize the need for laboratory prototypes and working equipment - the virtual ECU system is much easier to replicate than the real hardware system Many, its configuration can be quickly copied and expanded, and the cost is low. Each engineer can have a development environment to avoid occupying scarce resources (such as HIL bench testing) - more engineers can benefit from it, and the project development cycle can also be greatly shortened. shorten.