Automated Test Environment for On-Board Diagnostics Counters for an Automotive On-Road Application

Electronics control unit (ECU) is the foremost part of present-time engine. Electronics in the vehicle are gaining more and more significance. So overall complexity and dependency of embedded software employed on ECU has increased over a period. Henceforth it is critical to test and approve the execution of ECU before conveying it in real workplace. The performance of engines on Highways can be tested by monitoring the parameters called as On-Board Diagnostics Counters (OBD), which is responsible for vehicle's self-diagnostics and reporting capability. The testing of these OBD Counters with existing process of manual testing sufficiently requires great amount of man-hours, thus manual testing is less reliable and non-programmable. So in order to improve efficiency and to reduce the testing efforts, automated testing can be used. Automated testing is faster, also helps to avoid the human errors. This paper deals with creating the automated test sequence for On-Board Diagnostics Counters. For automated testing NI Test Stand is used as software platform to develop test sequences, Electronic Control Module (ECM), Engine simulator serves as hardware platform. The objective of this project is to implement automated test environment for OBD Counters using Test bench setup to monitor various parameters automatically, which will robustly reduce the man hours by 50%.