Supporting Testing during the Complete Development Cycle

The amount of software in today’s passenger cars is increasing and will increase even more as the industry moves towards new business areas like autonomous driving and mobility services. At the same time the development cycle times are shrinking to reduce the time-to-market for new features.

At Volvo Cars, we support this development by providing virtual prototypes to enable virtual testing through the complete industrialization phase of a vehicle development project. In the early stage when no hardware is available this is enabled by fully virtual prototypes running Software-In-the-Loop (SIL) using CAE data as the source. The longer the project goes on, the more testing is also performed in Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) rigs.

To keep control over the integrity of the software quality we use a gating system in the Continuous Integration toolchain where the virtual prototype is used to secure every software change. Only changes with passing tests are accepted into the master branch.

In this presentation we will explain some building blocks of the Virtual Assembly Line used to build virtual prototypes. Important aspects of how to handle modularity, a variation of fidelity levels and support of multiple target environments, all within one single toolchain, will be covered. Important aspects of how we use Continuous Integration to keep track of the quality of the toolchain will be presented. Additionally, the integration across multiple execution platforms for both SIL and HIL at Volvo Cars is presented along with several use-cases.