Concept and approach

The underlying concept of OBELICS is to implement systematic modelling and testing (and corresponding corrections) of the system from the begin phase. In traditional design flows, there can be no systematic testing of the entire system until it has been fully implemented. As a result, design based problems remain hidden until late in the system development, when fixing them is significantly more costly and disruptive. Shifting to model-based testing, as envisioned within OBELICS, enables engineering teams to more readily understand design change impacts, communicate design intent and analyse a system design before it is built.

The current approach of the automotive industry is based on the V-Model, where the integration and testing is carried out on the right side of the V. In traditional design flows, there can be no systematic testing of the entire system until it has been fully implemented. Within OBELICS, testing efforts will be transferred from the right arm of the V to the left in order to reduce the overall development time and effort. Since very detailed models with high accuracy are often slow in computational speed, it is important to reduce the model complexity for certain simulation or testing tasks in an easy and efficient way, where higher computational speed is required (e.g. real-time capability). Scalability of models means that they can be easily adapted in the one direction (higher accuracy) or the other (higher computational speed), dependent on the requirements of each investigation task.