A critical requirement for robust, optimized, and secure design of vehicular systems is the ability to do system-level exploration, i.e., comprehend the interactions involved among ECUs, sensors, and communication interfaces in realizing systemlevel use cases and the impact of various design choices on these interactions. This must be done early in the system design to enable the designer to make optimal design choices without requiring a cost-prohibitive design overhaul. In this paper, we develop a virtual prototyping environment for the modeling and simulation of vehicular systems. Our solution, VIVE, is modular and configurable, allowing the user to conveniently introduce new system-level use cases. Unlike other related simulation environments, our platform emphasizes coordination and communication among various vehicular components and just the abstraction of the necessary computation of each electronic control unit. We discuss the ability of VIVE to explore the interactions between a number of realistic use cases in the automotive domain. We demonstrate the utility of the platform, in particular, to create real-time in-vehicle communication optimizers for various optimization targets. We also show how to use such a prototyping environment to explore vehicular security compromises. Furthermore, we showcase the experimental integration and validation of the platform with a hardware setup in a real-time scenario.
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VIVE: Virtualization of Vehicular Electronics for System-level Exploration
We develop a virtual prototyping infrastructure for modeling and simulation of automotive systems. We focus on exercising and exploring use cases involving system-level coordination of vehicular electronics, sensors, and software. In current practice, such use cases can only be explored late in the design when all the relevant hardware components are available. Any design change, e.g., for optimization or security or even functional errors found during the exploration, incurs prohibitive cost at that stage. Our solution is a flexible, configurable prototyping platform that enables the user to seamlessly add new system-level use cases. Unlike other related prototyping environments, the focus of our platform is on communication and coordination among different components, not the computation of individual Electronic Control Units. We report on the use of the platform for implementing several realistic usage scenarios on automotive platforms and exploring the effects of their interaction. In particular, we show how to use the platform to develop real-time in-vehicle communication optimizers for different optimization targets.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908549
- PAR ID:
- 10296351
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 24th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation (ITSC 2021)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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