Collaborative Model Development for System Simulation

System simulation is a crucial factor in mastering the increasing complexity during the vehicle development process. Different quality assurance measures must be taken into account to ensure that the system simulation is a reliable partner. Users and developers consider the main quality characteristics to be maintainability and efficiency when focusing on a simulation framework. To fulfill these quality characteristics, Opel developed a cross-domain simulation framework named AXIOM (automotive X-in-the-loop, object-oriented model framework). AXIOM boosts the capability of reuse of component models and tools across all simulation domains like model-in-the-loop, software-in-the-loop, or hardware-in-the-loop, and makes use of Git™ version management to enable collaborative development.

To achieve increased readability and consistency, a tool named Model Configurator was developed to support the integration process for building up application models. A modular approach enables the reusability of models and simplifies the maintenance.

Agile principles have been established to work collaboratively and efficiently with cross-functional development teams. The developers and the customers who use the application models can report bugs and request features via Jira. The team will discuss the feature requests and the workload will be estimated. This feature request will be planned in frequently repeated sprints. If there is a bug, a hotfix will be performed. In regular intervals, releases are created and distributed to the customer.

To improve the release quality, a continuous deployment approach is used. Correspondingly, for physical vehicles, there are quality measurements at the end of the production line. In the virtual factory, Opel uses quality measurements to check continuously if the model is working correctly. All information is collected with Logstash, analyzed with Elasticsearch, and visualized in Kibana, the so-called ELK stack.