Information and Communication Support for Automotive Testing and Validation

The need for automotive testing and validation is growing due to the increasing complexity of electronic control systems in modern vehicles. Since testing and validation is expensive in terms of prototypes and personnel, simply increasing the volume of the testing can be prohibitively costly. Moreover, since product development cycles must be shortened in order to reduce the time-to-market for new products, there is less time available for testing and validation. Consequently, more testing and validation work will have to be performed in less time in future automotive development projects. To some extent this challenge can be met through virtual product development techniques and simulation, but there will still be an increasing need for testing and validation of physical prototypes. This can only be accomplished by improving the efficiency of automotive testing and validation procedures, and the key to realizing this, we will argue in this chapter, is by introducing novel information and communication support tools that fundamentally transform the way automotive testing and validation is conducted. With the explosive proliferation of wireless communication technology over the last few years, new opportunities have emerged for accessing data from vehicles remotely, without requiring physical access to the vehicles. Special purpose wireless communication equipment can be installed in designated test vehicles, acting as gateways to the internal communication buses and to on-board test equipment such as flight recorders. With a fleet of test vehicles thus configured, sophisticated telematics services can be implemented that enable communication of virtually any kind of data to and from any vehicle, providing the bandwidth of the wireless connection is sufficient. This has an enormous potential of making automotive testing and validation more efficient, since much of a test engineer's time is spent finding the right data to analyse. By eliminating the need for the engineer to have physical access to the test vehicle, scarce vehicle prototypes can be made available for multiple simultaneous tests, reducing the overall need for physical prototypes. Moreover, the test vehicles can be accessed by the engineers irrespective of their geographical location, which makes a much broader range of test objects available for tests and frees up time for the engineers in scheduling a prototype for a test. The data resulting from the test can be uploaded from the vehicles to a server from where it can be accessed by any number of interested (and duly authorized) engineers. By having measurement data automatically collected into a central database, as opposed to being stored on the hard drive of each engineer's computer, the opportunities for reuse of data is greatly