1,603 research outputs found
Towards a Formalism-Based Toolkit for Automotive Applications
The success of a number of projects has been shown to be significantly
improved by the use of a formalism. However, there remains an open issue: to
what extent can a development process based on a singular formal notation and
method succeed. The majority of approaches demonstrate a low level of
flexibility by attempting to use a single notation to express all of the
different aspects encountered in software development. Often, these approaches
leave a number of scalability issues open. We prefer a more eclectic approach.
In our experience, the use of a formalism-based toolkit with adequate notations
for each development phase is a viable solution. Following this principle, any
specific notation is used only where and when it is really suitable and not
necessarily over the entire software lifecycle. The approach explored in this
article is perhaps slowly emerging in practice - we hope to accelerate its
adoption. However, the major challenge is still finding the best way to
instantiate it for each specific application scenario. In this work, we
describe a development process and method for automotive applications which
consists of five phases. The process recognizes the need for having adequate
(and tailored) notations (Problem Frames, Requirements State Machine Language,
and Event-B) for each development phase as well as direct traceability between
the documents produced during each phase. This allows for a stepwise
verification/validation of the system under development. The ideas for the
formal development method have evolved over two significant case studies
carried out in the DEPLOY project
Customer perception of switch-feel in luxury sports utility vehicles
Successful new product introduction requires that product characteristics relate to the customer on functional, emotional, aesthetic and cultural levels. As a part of research into automotive human machine interfaces (HMI), this paper describes holistic customer research carried out to investigate how the haptics of switches in luxury sports utility vehicles (SUVs) are perceived by customers. The application of these techniques, including an initial proposal for objective specifications, is addressed within the broader new product introduction context, and benefits described.
One-hundred and one customers of SUVs assessed the feel of automotive push switches, completing the tasks both in, and out of vehicles to investigate the effect of context. Using the semantic differential technique, hedonic testing, and content analysis of customersâ verbatim comments, a holistic picture has been built up of what influences the haptic experience. It was found that customers were able to partially discriminate differences in switch-feel, alongside considerations of visual appearance, image, and usability. Three factors named âAffectiveâ, âRobustness and Precisionâ, and âSilkinessâ explained 61% of the variance in a principle components analysis. Correlations of the factors with acceptance scores were 0.505, 0.371, and 0.168, respectively
SVG for Automotive User Interfaces
International audienceIn car cockpits, a wide range of graphic displays, from the low-end multi-functional devices to the most advanced reconfigurable clusters, represent an increasing part of the on-board information systems. We address within the EDONA HMI project the modeling of such human-machine interfaces (HMIs) and the development of an integrated HMI design environment that would improve current development practices. In this article we specifically discuss modeling issues: we explain why the SVG format was selected as the basis of the HMI graphic content description and present domain-specific extensions, mostly related to the HMI functional description, that provide support for a consistent modeling of HMI components
Understanding customers' holistic perception of switches in automotive humanâmachine interfaces
For successful new product development, it is necessary to understand the customers' holistic experience of the product beyond traditional task completion, and acceptance measures. This paper describes research in which ninety-eight UK owners of luxury saloons assessed the feel of push-switches in five luxury saloon cars both in context (in-car) and out of context (on a bench). A combination of hedonic data (i.e. a measure of âlikingâ), qualitative data and semantic differential data was collected. It was found that customers are clearly able to differentiate between switches based on the degree of liking for the samples' perceived haptic qualities, and that the assessment environment had a statistically significant effect, but that it was not universal. A factor analysis has shown that perceived characteristics of switch haptics can be explained by three independent factors defined as âImageâ, âBuild Qualityâ, and âClickinessâ. Preliminary steps have also been taken towards identifying whether existing theoretical frameworks for user experience may be applicable to automotive humanâmachine interfaces
Building on the DEPLOY Legacy: Code Generation and Simulation
The RODIN, and DEPLOY projects laid solid foundations for further
theoretical, and practical (methodological and tooling) advances with Event-B.
Our current interest is the co-simulation of cyber-physical systems using
Event-B. Using this approach we aim to simulate various features of the
environment separately, in order to exercise deployable code. This paper has
two contributions, the first is the extension of the code generation work of
DEPLOY, where we add the ability to generate code from Event-B state-machine
diagrams. The second describes how we may use code, generated from
state-machines, to simulate the environment, and simulate concurrently
executing state-machines, in a single task. We show how we can instrument the
code to guide the simulation, by controlling the relative rate that
non-deterministic transitions are traversed in the simulation.Comment: In Proceedings of DS-Event-B 2012: Workshop on the experience of and
advances in developing dependable systems in Event-B, in conjunction with
ICFEM 2012 - Kyoto, Japan, November 13, 201
A component-based approach to humanâmachine interface systems that support agile manufacturing
The development of next generation manufacturing systems is currently an active area of
research worldwide. Globalisation is placing new demands on the manufacturing industry
with products having shorter lifecycles and being required in more variants. Manufacturing systems must therefore be agile to support frequent manufacturing system reconfiguration
involving globally distributed engineering partners. The research described in this thesis
addresses one aspect within this research area, the Human Machine Interface (HMI) system
that support the personnel involved in the monitoring, diagnostics and reconfiguration of
automated manufacturing production machinery.
Current HMI systems are monolithic in their design, generally offer poor connectivity to
other manufacturing systems and require highly skilled personnel to develop and maintain
them.
The new approach established in the research and presented in this thesis provides a
specification capture technique (using a novel storyboarding modelling notation) that enables
the end users HMI functionality to be specified and rapidly developed into fully functional
End User HMI's via automated generation tools.
A novel feature in this HMI system architecture that all machine information is stored in a common unified machine data model which ensures consistent accurate machine data is
available to all machine lifecycle engineering tools including the HMI.
The system's run-time architecture enables remote monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to
be available to geographically distributed engineering partners using standard internet technologies. The implementation of this novel HMI approach has been prototyped and evaluated using the industrial collaborators full scale demonstrator machines within cylinder head machining and engine assembly applications
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Application of the interface analysis template for delivering system requirements
yesThis paper presents a structured approach for systems requirements analysis that integrates use case modelling with a coherent flows based approach for describing interface exchanges based on the Interface Analysis Template. The approach is discussed in the context of current frameworks for requirements elicitation from the engineering design and systems engineering domains, and it is illustrated with an automotive case study. This illustrates the strength of the framework to support structured multi-domain and multi-disciplinary analysis of requirements for complex systems
Evaluating the impact of adopting a component-based approach within the automotive domain
Component-based technology applied to the control system of production machinery is
one of the new research developments in the automotive sector. Although it is
important to evaluate the technical aspects of this new paradigm, an appreciation of the
impact from the business and human aspects is equally important to the stakeholders in
the industry. However, the current evaluation approaches do not offer a method to
capture and analyse the component-based technology that is simple to use and
produces results that are readily understood by the stakeholders involved in the process.
This study is based upon a research project at Loughborough University to look into the
effect of the implementation of a component-based control system for production
machinery in the automotive sector (referred to as the component-based approach)
and is focused on the business and the human aspects of the approach. [Continues.
Functional Safety Concept Generation within the Process of Preliminary Design of Automated Driving Functions at the Example of an Unmanned Protective Vehicle
Structuring the early design phase of automotive systems is an important part of efficient and successful
development processes. Today, safety considerations (e.g., the safety life cycle of ISO 26262)
significantly affect the course of development. Preliminary designs are expressed in functional system
architectures, which are required to form safety concepts. Thus, mapping tasks and work products to a
reference process during early design stages is an important part of structuring the system development.
This contribution describes the systematic creation and notation of the functional safety concept within
the concept phase of development of an unmanned protective vehicle within the research project aFAS.
Different stages of preliminary design and dependencies between them are displayed by the work
products created and used. The full set of functional safety requirements and an excerpt of the safety
argument structure of the SAE level 4 application are presented
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