Cyber–Physical Codesign at the Functional Level for Multidomain Automotive Systems

Software-integrated multidomain automotive systems, which is also referred to as automotive cyber–physical systems (CPS) consist of various interacting domains (software, hardware, multiphysics, communication, etc.). Design decisions in one domain may completely change the constraints and requirements in the other domains, e.g., adding more functions in a modern automotive CPS may require changes to thousands of lines of software code or even the mechanical architecture. Existing CPS design methodologies are siloed in a specific domain and therefore have limited design space exploration capabilities because only one domain can be tested at a time. This paper presents a functional-level cyber–physical codesign methodology starting from the functional model of the CPS capable of concurrently expressing (multi-)physics and control in automotive applications. Moreover, we introduce a high-level synthesis algorithm capable of selecting a set of optimized system architectures using various executable simulation components and cost metrics. We demonstrate our methodology with a realistic automotive use case and explore various design alternatives for implementing the control systems in pure continuous domain (e.g., traditional automotive subsystems without engine control units) or hybrid domain (e.g., brake-by-wire, steer-by-wire, drive-by-wire, etc.) under power, performance, and reliability constraints.