The development of software-defined vehicles demands processes that can help decouple software from hardware, design self-contained apps for easy updates, and automate software build and testing, while still ensuring the consistency and traceability required for software quality, safety, and security.

Model-Based Design offers distinct advantages that can help you go from software architecture conceptualization to component design and back up to software integration and testing–enabling higher quality and reliability of the final product. In this presentation, you’ll see how Simulink® is rapidly evolving to realize this vision. Recent investments have helped create an environment that accounts for major trends in service-oriented architectures, code-based component development, virtual testing, continuous integration, and much more.

Electric vehicle systems are much more complex compared to IC engine-based vehicles, due to the larger number or electronically controlled power components and the expectation of seamless integration with infotainment and connectivity systems. An integrated systems engineering approach, transcending the six dimensions of integration—mechanical, electrical, signal, control, heat transfer, and mass transfer—is needed to efficiently integrate the various components in an electric vehicle so that vehicle reliability, performance targets, and program timelines are met. Rigorous breaking down of system requirements to component requirements, decoupling of component requirements, and robust test case generation to test these requirements are three key elements of an effective system engineering process. Such a process will enable different engineering teams to pursue their designs in parallel with each other while avoiding costly mistakes due to integration errors as the prototypes are built. Mathematical modeling of the system components, their requirements, and the system control strategy in an integrated manner would best serve this. However, to fully utilize the benefits of model-based systems engineering, this process must be fully integrated into the overall vehicle engineering process.