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Description
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This project addresses the development process of embedded systems for Agricultural (AG) and Construction Equipments (CE) vehicles of interest for CNH (Case New Holland), a FIAT Group company which is also part of the ELASIS consortium. CNH is the first vendor in AG and at the third place in CE, on a worldwide base. ELASIS for CNH, as well as for other branches of the FIAT Group, actively contributes to innovation and improvement of processes and products.
Embedded Systems are electronic devices designed to perform a specific application on custom hardware, usually not reprogrammable by end users. They are integrated in the system they manage, and control (partially or completely) system functions, often in real-time. Their hardware and software architectures are strongly tailored on the task they should carry on, so, since no requirement of scalability or reuse are usually defined, both HW and SW customization are implemented to reduce their physical size, power consumption and manufacturing costs.
As for any other consumer goods of daily use, commercial success of AG and CE vehicles depends on features implemented in their own embedded systems such as:
1) Energy efficiency and emissions (advanced motor control, low-energy hydraulic actuators, hybrid propulsion systems, …)
2) Safety/Driving assistance (harvest quality control, data downloads, stability and trajectory control, obstacle avoidance, …)
3) Service (remote diagnostic and assistance, on-board SW upgrade, customer care data gathering)
In other areas, the strong demand for embedded systems together with large production volumes started a virtuous standardization process of both architectures (see Autosar in the automotive field) and in the IT solutions supporting embedded systems lifecycle. This process is so advanced that for some classes of applications centralized maintenance solution are today available (an example of such approach is the development of the “Blue&Me” display device, resulting from a partnership between Fiat Auto and Microsoft).
However, small production volumes of AG and CE vehicles (2 orders of magnitude lower than city cars) has not been able yet to start a similar consolidation process. Hence, present scenario of embedded system development is characterized by:
• not standardized development and maintenance processes, regardless of SW Engineering methodologies and approaches
• chaotic development and validation IT solution, and arbitrary approach to validation and testing
• difficult time and costs estimate because of the lack of proper documentation and the absence of clear and objective relations between anomalies, maintenance and validation.
The proposed research project therefore aims at innovating both processes and tools supporting the whole life cycle management of embedded systems in AG and EC, so to improve their reliability, to help the user in valuating anomalies and to introduce state of the art development and validation methodologies with particular reference to design and virtual validation. The latter point will be developed in the following steps
• by adopting emerging SW Engineering methodologies such as Requirements Lifecycle Management, Model Driven Development or Test Driven Development.
• by extending validation from virtual design to Hardware in the Loop (HIL) and field testing
• by identifying an open IT architecture where to integrate modeling, development, and validation tools together with Bill of Materials and Product Data Management environment
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