Resource Management of Automotive Engine Control Units

Embedded systems play a crucial role in the contemporary automotive industry, where advanced vehicles integrate numerous electronic control units responsible for diverse functionalities. This paper specifically focuses on the engine control unit within the power-train. With increasing ambitions on reducing emission values and a growing functional environment, Robert Bosch AG anticipates that the resources of the current generation of Engine Control Units (ECUs) will reach their limits within the next 3–5 years. The current development workflow relies on resource optimizations with an iterative expert-based approach, success is achieved through significant manual effort. In this work, we propose a methodology that leverages an existing measure based on task splitting from the early stages of ECU development. Our goal is to streamline the design process for engineers and accelerate ECUs development through a cutting-edge software architecture workflow, aiming to minimize manual effort and expedite project timelines. The proposed approach was integrated and validated on a real-world control unit of the power-train, demonstrating highly significant results, with savings of around <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${50}\% \pm 10\%$</tex>. This considerable reduction in time can be attributed to the increased investment required during the architectural design stage, which subsequently reduces the labor-intensive manual integration effort. Additionally, there has been an achieved reduction of approximately 10% in core load.