Hybrid systems in automotive electronics design

Abstract

Automotive electronic design is certainly one of the most attractive and promising application domains for hybrid system techniques. Some successful hybrid system applications to automotive model development and control algorithm design have already been reported in the literature. However, despite the significant advances achieved in the past few years, hybrid methods are in general still not mature enough for their effective introduction in the automotive industry design processes at large. In this paper, we take a broad view of the development process for embedded control systems in the automotive industry with the purpose of identifying challenges and additional opportunities for hybrid systems. We identify critical steps in the design flow and extract a number of open problems where hybrid system technology might play an important role.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Pierpaolo Murrieri from PARADES; Gabriele Serra, Giacomo Gentile and Walter Nesci, from Magneti Marelli Powertrain (Bologna, I); Harald Heinecke, from BMW and Autosar (Munich, G); Roland Jeutter, from ETAS (Stuttgart, G); Gabriele Pieraccini from Ferrari (Modena, I); Paolo Ferracin from CNH (Modena, I); Gilberto Burgio from Ford Research Center (Aachen, G) for the many interesting debates on the topics of the paper. We gratefully acknowledge the partial support by the CC (Control and Computation) E.U. Project (grant FP5-IST-2001-33520), the HYCON E.U. Network of Excellence (grant FP6-IST-511368) and the CHESS NSF ITR grant CCR-0225610.