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Enhancing autonomous driving with MBSE
How MobileDrive is leveraging the power of model-based systems engineering to build the advanced driver assistance systems of the future
By Luke Morris
Did you know that the global autonomous vehicle (AV) market is predicted to be worth nearly $400 billion by 2025?
That’s not to say that all these vehicles will be driving themselves by then. However, many already have some of the simpler forms of autonomy, such as adaptive cruise control and lane centering assistance. As the market grows, manufacturers are looking to better incorporate advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) into their vehicles.
FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, built its name in the mobile and wireless communication and consumer electronics markets. In 2021, on seeing the increased demand for autonomous vehicles, they partnered with Stellantis, a leading global automotive manufacturer, to form MobileDrive.
As well as using its existing skills and experience to develop infotainment systems for vehicles, MobileDrive wanted to build its own ADAS to meet the growing demands of the AV market.
A new approach
MobileDrive identified that a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach would be key to realizing its ADAS ambitions. This would allow them to capture data from the requirements stage through to development and testing to ensure systems were fully optimized and that they could deliver products of the highest quality.
To facilitate the adoption of MBSE, MobileDrive enlisted Simcenter’s expertise. Together, they agreed to focus on six ADAS features: lane keeping assistance (LKA), emergency lane keeping (ELK), lane following control (LFC), auto lane change (ALC), evasive steering assistance (ESA) and autonomous emergency steering (AES).
“Simcenter™ Engineering services gave us a good understanding of the basics, including how to deliver on requirements and how to build the initial architecture,” says Winston Hsu, MobileDrive CTO. “They also helped us to understand best practices for writing and managing use test cases to guide software development.”
Advancing with Siemens Xcelerator
The teams used a range of products from the Siemens Xcelerator platform to meet their goals including Simcenter™ Amesim™ software, Simcenter™ Prescan™ software and application lifecycle management tool, Polarion.
Once market studies had been carried out to define the system requirements and build the models, Simcenter Amesim and Simcenter Prescan were used to define the environment for different driving scenarios. This incorporated various virtual ADAS sensors such as cameras and short- and long-range radar. The features were then tested in a closed-loop framework between the different software platforms. This digital twin allowed engineers to identify performance issues and address them as early as possible in the development cycle.
Real-time collaboration
Using Polarion, the teams stored all levels of requirements such as use cases, customer needs, OEM needs, and system, software, functional safety, and failure mode requirements. These were used to develop software architecture and software feature requirement specifications that were implemented with Simulink model-in-the-loop testing. Polarion provided the results in a dashboard with real-time metrics on the pass/fail criteria and key performance indicators.
By hosting Polarion on a cloud platform, engineers from both MobileDrive and Simcenter Engineering and Consulting Services team could easily access the software from anywhere and collaborate efficiently and effectively.
Crucially, Polarion’s ability to maintain and capture verification testing allowed MobileDrive to ensure it was compliant with Automotive SPICE and ISO 26262 regulations.
“The MBSE approach provided by Simcenter Engineering and Consultancy Services was extremely successful,” says Burt Chen, MobileDrive project manager. “The functionalities all worked as promised and this gave us the confidence to deliver high-quality software to our OEM.”
Ready to drive forward into the future
As part of the project, the team from Simcenter Engineering and Consulting Services conducted multiple hands-on workshops to train the MobileDrive team in using the new MBSE framework and ensured that everything built in Polarion was integrated into their own development and production environments.
“Simcenter Engineering Services provided us with industry best practices for developing and using MBSE,” says Chen. “We now have a full understanding of how to accelerate our algorithm and verification activities for product development. Using Polarion also showed us how we can be more compliant and structured in order to meet functional safety standards, such as ISO 26262.”
By using a digital twin, MobileDrive has been able to verify ADAS software features much earlier in the development cycle than if they had to wait for hardware-in-the-loop testing. Ultimately, this implementation of MBSE has resulted in a significant reduction of the time to market of the ADAS product before any physical prototypes were even built.
“MobileDrive’s goal is to be the leading provider of ADAS engine control units,” says Hsu. “Thanks to our partnership with Simcenter Engineering Services, we anticipate that we will be able to bring these to market in a much more streamlined, efficient manner.”