Rapid prototyping of a model-based fuel injection and ignition control systems

In this paper we show how off-the-shelf tools can be used for the rapid prototyping of electronic fuel injection and ignition control systems that rely on a middleware developed by STMicroelectronics for its Electronic Control Units (ECUs). This middleware abstracts the functionalities of the ECU, whose architecture is based on the Generic Timer Module and on the L9177A component, by exposing to the developers a set of high-level services that are agnostic from their low-level implementation. By exploiting the Mathworks Legacy Code Tool, the middleware Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have been included in the Simulink® environment. Moreover, thanks to the Embedded Coder®, automatic code generation for rapid prototyping of the control software has been enabled. Therefore, in the proposed framework, the designers can focus on the design and validation of the control algorithms in a model-based design environment, by ignoring the details of the target hardware. Automatic code generation is then exploited to deploy the control algorithm on the target ECU, to perform further hardware-in-the-loop validation of the control algorithms. The paper gives an overview of the middleware and of its integration within the Simulink® environment. Moreover, the effectiveness of the rapid prototyping capabilities are discussed by means of two examples.