Modeling Transportation Systems
Automobiles began to come under electronic control decades ago with the advent of Electronic Control Units (ECU) that managed basic engine functions. Over the years these modules proliferated within vehicles of all types, to the point where today’s autos, trucks, and tractors may incorporate dozens of modules overseeing functions as diverse as fuel injection and heated seats.
To contend with the rapid growth of electronic content, manufacturers must manage complexity, employ more automation in design processes, and achieve faster, more reliable system integration and component design. Automation and verification of hardware, software and mechatronics systems must go beyond mere ECU design automation and focus on interactions between hardware, software and the network connecting the platform components and systems.
An additional side effect of increasing complexity is the growing reliance on software to support differentiating product features. Improved automation is also needed in the design of electrical, electronic and embedded software components, which require a stable and reliable software development environment for modeling, simulation, verification and testing of software interfaced to actual hardware.
Why Use SystemVision and BridgePoint?
The Design Process Begins with a System-Wide View
SystemVision is a full-featured mechatronic system design and analysis tool suite. Created as a solution for a wide range of applications requiring coordination across the software, electronic, and mechanical domains, SystemVision is an ideal solution for vehicle design. After all, every automobile, truck, and tractor is actually a system of interacting components, large and small.
The SystemVision modeling environment addresses the functional, architectural, and implementation levels of the vehicle design process, accounting for every aspect of the underlying system design:
- Application and platform software
- Sensors, actuators, and motors
- Digital and analog electronic elements (including mixed-signal)
Combining high-level behavioral models with lower-level device models in a multi-disciplined environment, SystemVision ensures fast, reliable prototyping and evaluation of design decisions. Engineers can quickly and easily create and analyze designs that include levels of abstraction from math-based behavior down to circuit implementations. Modeling technology enables designers to grasp complex project challenges and keep pace with changing, evolving systems.
Modeling Methods Take Aim at Embedded Software Complexity
UML models increase the visibility of a design and help to manage the complexity of the entire system. The BridgePoint UML suite of tools is an advanced, proven environment that enables model-driven development for complex, system-level applications. BridgePoint allows designers to create, validate, communicate, and generate target implementations from functional models of sub-systems to complete, complex systems, providing for true system-level design.
Executable models:
- Allow testing and verification of a system before hardware platform is available
- Enable removal of defects early in the cycle
BridgePoint facilitates the creation of high quality, regular code that represents both the software and hardware portions of a design, improving productivity through executable UML models and open, flexible, repeatable code generation. Using BridgePoint, requirements can be refined and validated through the use of executable models. BridgePoint gives its users the tools to model full-system requirements and drive the downstream design flow.
Toolbox
- White Paper: CAN Bus Signal Integrity Design
- White Paper: Simulation Provides Key to Explosive Automotive Design Challenges
- On-demand Web Seminar: System Modeling, Simulation & Analysis
Contact Mentor Graphics
- Request Information or call toll free: 1-800-547-3000
IESF 2011: Automotive and Commercial Vehicles
The Integrated Electrical Solutions Forum (IESF) 2011 is once again being held at the Steigenberger Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany on November 17th. Register Today
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Software Evaluation: SystemVision bridges the gap between high-level system modeling and component-level circuit prototyping. This rich, flexible modeling technology provides the perfect mixed-technology simulation environment... View Software Evaluation
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Software Evaluation: BridgePoint is an advanced, proven, UML-based environment that enables getting real-time embedded applications right the first time. It provides high quality, regular code conforming to any convention or... View Software Evaluation