CASE STUDY

FordHybridp
Customer

Ford Motor Company

Ford Hybrid Fuel Cell Vehicle Control Software

Challenge

Pi Innovo was asked to produce the software for three of the dozen or so electronic boxes controlling the vehicle systems on Ford’s hybrid fuel cell vehicle, implement the control software for the:

Vehicle System Controller
Energy Management Module and
Thermal System Controller

Solution

Pi Innovo developed a software platform that would run on all three controllers (all subtly different) that would allow applications developed in Matlab/Simulink to be autocoded.

The autocoding was approached with production in mind so that robust code could be reliably produced.

HiL testing was used to simulate the electrical environment of the rest of the vehicle so that a good level of confidence could be placed in system tests carried out on the bench prior to vehicle integration.

A set of test scripts was developed to allow full regression testing to be carried out on the Vehicle System Controller and Energy Management Module when changes were introduced – saving significant time for the test engineers.

Project Features

Production autocode
Safety-related development
Development of autocode platform
Trans-Atlantic project team
Distributed architecture
Motorola PowerPC family
Scripted hardware-in-the-loop regression testing

Timeframe

3 years
September 2004