Parasitic Battery Drain Problems and AUTOSAR Acceptance Testing

Battery Drain problems can occur in the vehicle due to improper network management between electronic control units (ECUs). Aim of this article is to identify the factors that cause transmission and cease of transmission of a network management message of an ECU along with its application messages that controls the sleep/wake-up performance of other ECUs in the network. Strategy used here is, based on the root cause analysis of problems found in Display unit in vehicle environment, the functional CAN signals impacting sleep/wake-up behavior is re-mapped along with the state flow transition of AUTOSAR NM Algorithm. A re-defined test case design and simulation for vehicle model is created. Especially it focuses on validating the impact of functional CAN signals on DUT's sleep/wake-up performance. The result includes, design and development of use case matrix(mapped with specification) to validate the impact of network management messages, its flow of transition as well as the impact of functional CAN messages on the sleep/wake-up behavior of DUT and on the system as a whole. Also a new set of system level defects identified across Audio and display units-based on the re-designed network management test procedure and simulation with Vector Canoe model (comprehensive software tool for development, test and analysis of entire ECU networks and individual ECUs.). This article provides relevant design guidelines for acceptance testing of any communicative network that follows AUTOSAR standard and this can be deployed across programs/products. It concludes validation of network management functionality (AUTOSAR) shall not be restricted only to the transmission of network management (NM) message of an ECU, as well as shall consider application messages that triggers NM messages of other ECUs in the network.