Technical Articles

Promoting the Robustness of Calibration-Based Computations

By Jay Abraham, MathWorks


Calibration parameters are extensively used in complex automotive engine control units (ECUs), including ECUs for the engine, transmission, anti-lock braking system (ABS), and electronic stability control (ESC). Calibration engineers can set the exact values of calibration parameters for a given software application after the ECU software is built. In an ECU, there are often hundreds and sometimes tens of thousands of calibration parameters, some of which are multidimensional tables. With this level of complexity, ensuring that the ECU software using the values from these tables will not encounter an overflow operation, divide-by-zero condition, or illegal memory access run-time error can be a significant challenge.

With traditional testing it is impossible to exhaustively test complex software systems comprising both calibration parameters and code to prove that the software is free of run-time errors. Verification based on formal methods can reveal much about the quality of the software from a run-time perspective. Using formal methods, engineers can specify the full range of data in the calibration tables and exhaustively verify the software rather than testing with a limited range of data in the tables.

Copyright © 2012 by The MathWorks, Inc. Published by SAE International, with permission.

This paper was presented at SAE World Congress.

Read full paper.

Published 2012

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