Test management and automation

Alma Automotive Test Control System adapts to the available test system layout: besides the control of engine speed and torque it can be used to manage air, oil, water and fuel conditioning systems, directly implementing the actuator's real-time control, or simply dispatching demand targets to external controllers. Every component of the test cell (e.g., the ventilating, fuel supply, fire extinguishing systems, etc.) can be directly controlled or remoted, and any type of test cell transducer can virtually be managed. Finally, the Test Control System can interact with the most popular calibration tools, such as INCA, CanAPE, Sysma.

Alma Automotive test control software is based on NI VeriStand, a software environment for developing Real-Time testing applications, that allows to:

• Configure automatic procedures to control devices
• Perform data acquisition
• Manage channels (scales, alarms, mapping) and create calculated channels
• Run simulation models based on Simulink, Labview, etc...

The strength of Alma Automotive approach is the use of a standard interface (VeriStand) customized with models and custom components, running both on the Real-Time and host-PC environments.

Main benefits

The Automation can be useful in many phases of the testing and calibration process that can be carried out in steady state conditions or with dynamic approaches. Among others, these tests benefit of the test bench automation system:

• Execution of Design Of Experiment test plans
• Description of engine behaviour: overall volumetric efficiency, friction, torque, …
• Optimal spark/injection advance setting: finding the optimal value, and exploring the whole timing-BMEP/IMEP for torque control strategies
• Optimal fuelling: cylinder-by-cylinder volumetric efficiency determination, optimal injection phase, transient conditions lambda compensation
• Reliability tests: replication of track laps feeding the ECU with recorded (or simulated) signals

The application is developed according to the customer requirements and is delivered as a LabVIEW project: the customer accesses the source code and is able to manage the evolution of the automatic calibration software.

Several base requirements can be satisfied using standard tools available in VeriStand (Stimulus Profile), other may require to add customized procedures (custom tools, custom devices). Alma Automotive is able to tailor custom tools to the user’s need. Complex profiles and sequences of simple profiles of target settings (bench and ECU) can be uploaded from telemetry or built thanks to proper interfaces. Profiles may be repeated several times. 

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