2019 22nd International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS)
Design and Implementation of Vehicle Control
System for Pure Electric Vehicle Based on
AUTOSAR Standard
1st Zhongyuan Wang
School of Mechanical Engineering
Nanjing University of Science and Technology
Nanjing 210094, China
wangzz_11@163.com
Abstract—The vehicle control system is an import issue for
pure electric vehicle. This paper delineates a hierarchical vehicle
control system software for the pure electric vehicle based on
the AUTOSAR standard. Each control strategy is independently
modeled by MATLAB/Simulink. A Vehicle Control Unit (VCU)
with master-slave architecture is designed, which uses Freescale
MPC5606B as microcontroller. Finally, this VCU is used as the
control platform to test and verify the A00 class prototype car.
The results of the double-lane experience demonstrate that the
motor output torque is positively correlated with the accelerator
pedal opening, which realizs the basic functions of the vehicle.
At the same, the system can ensure the vehicle communication
load.
Keywords—AUTOSAR Standard, Vehicle control system,
Software architecture
I. INTRODUCTION
A pure electric vehicle refers to a vehicle that is driven by
a motor and meets the requirements of road traffic and safety
regulations.[1]. Vehicle control is the key function of pure
electric vehicles, which integrated in the Vehicle Control
Unit (VCU). But, the automotive electronics/electrical
architecture is becoming more and more complex, and the
controllers on the vehicle are also increasing. It is difficult for
different hardware platforms to unify the development
process and data format of the controller. The complexity of
the software also has multiplied. In response to the above-
mentioned industry crisis ， some of vehicle suppliers
propose the Automotive Open System Architecture
(AUTOSAR). After decades of development，AUTOSAR
became a worldwide development partnership of vehicle
manufacturers, suppliers, service providers and companies
from the automotive electronics, semiconductor and software
industry. This standard provides an open architecture for
automotive electronic software. Saleh Mirheidari [2]
proposed a creative way of utilizing AUTOSAR to overcome
the integration challenges in a multi-party object code. Youyu
Wu [3] puts forward a SPI driver design method based
AUTOSAR, which method can effectively complete
data transfer between host computer and slave computer.
Felice R [4] implements AUTOSAR Behavior Modeling
using UML/SYML in C. Zhou Y [5] develops AUTOSAR
application layer based on MATLAB/Simulink.
This paper focuses on the design of the vehicle control
system. According to the requirements of the AUTOSAR
standard, the Basic Software Layer (BSW), Application
Software Layer (ASW) and Runtime Environment (RTE) of
the vehicle control system are respectively implemented. The
ASW layer is designed by MTALAB/Simulink. The
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2nd Dejun Yin
School of Mechanical Engineering
Nanjing University of Science and Technology
Nanjing 210094, China
yin@njust.edu.cn
AUTOSAR authoring tool (AAT) implements the BSW layer
and RTE. Then, this paper presents a hardware architecture
of VCU. The VCU is a control platform to verify the
performance of the vehicle control system
II. THE DESIGN OF VEHICLE CONTROL UNIT
The vehicle control system, as shown in Fig 1, is
composed of the Vehicle Control Unit (VCU), DC/DC,
Motor, Motor Control Unit (MCU), Power Battery and
Battery Management System (BMS). According to driver's
operation (steering wheel position, accelerator pedal position,
brake pedal position etc.), the vehicle control strategy
determines driver's intention and controls the motor output
torque.
Fig. 1. The Network Topology of Vehicle Control System
The vehicle control unit is the key component of the
pure electric vehicle. As the carrier of the vehicle control
software, VCU needs to complete the acquisition of signals,
communicate with other control units of vehicle and storage
errors when vehicle was running.
A. The Hardware architecture design of VCU
A master-slave hardware architecture is applied for the
VCU hardware design, which uses Freescale MPC5606B as
the master control chip and KEA64 as slave chip. As shown
in Fig 2, the VCU is consist of a master-slave kernel, a Digital
Input/Output module, an Analog Input module, a Power
Management module (PMU) and CAN Transceiver modules.
The master-slave module consists of the MPC5606B, the
KEA64 and its peripheral circuits. The master chip
MPC5606B is responsible for processing the input signals of
the peripheral circuits. Redundant calculation is carried by the
slave chip KEA64 to improve the security level of the chip
The vehicle power supply network provides input power
to the PMU and the PMU converts the power to other modules
of the VCU.
The Analog Input module was responsible for collecting
the accelerator pedal opening signal and transmitting the
 2019 22nd International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS)

collected accelerator pedal voltage to the Microcontroller
module for processing. The two CAN transceiver modules is
connected to the CAN controller (FlexCAN) integrated in the
master control chip, so that other controllers can interact with
the VCU through the CAN network.
included. The Complex Device Drivers Abstraction Layer [9]
spans the various layers of the BSW, which is not specified by
the AUTOSAR standard. In CDD, the control of some
complex sensors can be realized. The Service Layer [10] is
located at the top of the BSW and provides various services to
the application layer through standardized interfaces, such as
vehicle network communication management services,
memory management services, diagnostic services, ECU state
management and so on
III. VEHICLE CONTROL STRATEGY DESIGN
According to the requirement analysis of the A00 class
prototype car, the strategies such as power up/down, driving
torque control, energy management, etc (Fig 4) is formulated.
The vehicle running mode is divided into driving mode,
external charging mode and emergency shutdown mode, as
shown in Fig5.

Fig. 2. The Hardware Architecture of VCU

B. The Software Architecture of VCU

As shown in Fig 3, the VCU software design is based on
the AUTOSAR standard. The architecture consists of
Application Software (ASW) Layer, Runtime Environment
(RTE) Layer and Basic Software (BSW) Layer. ASW Layer
is composed of Software Components (SWC) that implement
vehicle control strategies. The BSW layer provides various Fig. 4. Vehicle control strategy block diagram
basic services such as OS, communication stack, diagnostic
stack, and hardware driver to support the implementation of
ASW functions. RTE is responsible for data exchange
between ASW and BSW, so that the ASW layer can use
various services provided by BSW.
According to the division of the vehicle function,
software components such as Power On/Off SWC, Driver
Determination SWC, Energy Management SWC, Torque
Structure SWC, Vehicle Speed SWC is designed. The
software components are independent of each other, which
reduces the coupling degree of the vehicle strategy software.
When updating the vehicle control strategy, only the software
components of the ASW can be updated.

Fig. 5. Vehicle mode switching diagram

A. The strategy of Power On/Off

Fig. 3. The Software Architecture of VCU
The AUTOSAR standard divides the BSW Layer into four
parts, as shown in Fig 3, namely the Service Layer, the ECU
Abstraction Layer, the Microcontroller Abstraction Layer and
the Complex Device Drivers.[6] The Microcontroller
Abstraction Layer [7] is located at the bottom of the BSW,
which contains various drivers related to the hardware
platform. The ECU Abstraction Layer [8] is located in the
middle of the BSW, where hardware abstract interfaces were
Through the requirement analysis of the A00 class
prototype, the safely and reliably powered on/off is needed to
ensure the vehicle driving. During the vehicle on/off process,
multiple parts of the vehicle is involved such as motor
controller (MCU), high voltage accessory (DCDC), BMS,
acceleration/brake pedal, etc.
As shown in Fig 6, the power-up process of the vehicle
is generally triggered by the rising edge of the car key signal.
The following four steps are required to power on the vehicle.
• KL15 enable, VCU self-check.
• Close the low voltage main relay, wake up the MCU,
DCDC, BMS, and each controller performs self-
check.

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 2019 22nd International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS)
• Enable high voltage relay, close main negative relay
and pre-charge relay
• Disconnect the pre-charge relay, close the main
positive relay, vehicle high voltage power on is
completed
Fig. 6. The Flow Chart of Power On
The pure electric power-off process is triggered by the
falling edge of the car key signal. When the power-off
process occurs, the motor torque needs to be cleared. The
vehicle speed is less than 5Km/h. The DCDC enters the
standby state. The bus current of the BMS needs to be less
than 5A. As shown in Fig7, the following steps should be
performed to power off the vehicle.
• Disconnect main positive/main negative relay.
• Disconnect the high voltage relay to enable.
• Erase the motor torque and powered off the high
voltage of motor
• Disconnect the low voltage main relay and the vehicle
is powered off.
Fig. 7. The Flow Chart of Power Off
During the operation of the vehicle, it is inevitable that
some faults will occur. The vehicle faults are generally
classified by the fault level. Low-level faults generally
display alarm information through the meter. When a
medium-level fault occurs, the power from the BMS needs to
reduced to make the vehicle run at a low speed. If a serious
failure occurs, it needs to be shut down. Generally, when a
low-level or medium-level fault occurs, the vehicle power-off
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process is consistent with the normal power off process of the
vehicle. Once the vehicle has a serious fault, emergency
suspend is needed. The vehicle emergency power off process
is shown in Fig 8. According to the AUTOSAR standard, the
SWC of power up/down module is created to complete the
ASW layer modeling.
Fig. 8. The Flow Chart of Emergency Power Off
B. The strategy of Vehicle driving control
The key of the vehicle drive control strategy is the
torque calculation, which calculates the request torque of the
motor through the current driver input and vehicle status. Fig
9 is a block diagram of the calculation of the forward drive
torque.
Fig. 9. The Chart of Forward Drive Torque Calculation
The accelerator pedal opening degree MAP table was
checked by the accelerator pedal signal and the vehicle speed
signal to obtain an uncorrected normalized forward request
torque. Then, the forward request torque was corrected
according to the SOC.
In the calculation of the forward drive torque, the
matching adjustment of the forward accelerator pedal MAP
is the key to affecting the driving performance of the vehicle.
IV. AUTOSAR RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT (RTE) DESIGN
The data interaction between the ASW and the BSW are
implemented by the runtime environment. The so-called
runtime environment refers to the communication
mechanism that allows components to interact [11]
Therefore, in order to ensure the accuracy of the vehicle
control strategy data interaction, it is necessary to design the
AUTOSAR runtime environment.
 2019 22nd International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS)

Fig 10 shows the RTE design of the forward drive torque

calculation SWC，the ASW layer is completed in Simulink
and assigned the AUTOSAR attribute. An Inport/Outport in
Simulink is correspond to an AUTOSAR Sender/Receiver
A1 A2
Interface. In order to reduce the difficulty of developing an
application layer model conforming to the AUTOSAR
standard in Simulink, only the Sender/Receiver Interface used Fig. 11. Double-lane road and standard pile diagram
in the Simulink modeling process This paper establishes an
intermediate module to be compatible with this interface.
The prototype car enters the experience rode with 0 km/h
Even if the Client/Server Interface is not used in the Simulink
and record the data by CAN bus analysis equipment (CANoe)
modeling process, the ASW also can interact with the
in the whole time. The vehicle CAN bus load rate is 22.91%,
AUTOSAR BSW layer through the intermediate module.
(Fig 12)which meets the design requirements of the CAN bus
load rate and can ensure the correctness of the vehicle
communication.

Fig. 10. The RTE Design of Forward Drive Torque Calculation SWC

V. EXPERIENCE VERIFICATION
The feasibility of the vehicle control strategy based on the
AUTOSAR standard is verified through a certain A00 pure Fig. 12. Vehicle CAN Bus Load Rate
electric vehicle. The basic parameters of the prototype are
shown in Table I. Similarly, the vehicle speed , the accelerator pedal
TABLE I opening and the motor output torque was recorded by
A00 LEVEL PROTOTYPE CAR PARAMETER the CANoe device. The curve of those parameter is shown in
the Fig. 13(a), 13(b), 13(c) It can be seen from Fig. 5 that the
Parameter Value/mm
vehicle starts to accelerate from 0 km/h. The accelerator pedal
Length 2770 opening degree is gradually increased, and then the
Width 545 accelerator pedal gradually fell off. By comparing Fig. 13(b)
Height 1690 with Fig. 13(c), the motor output torque and the vehicle speed
Wheelbase 1680
Front Track 1310
increase simultaneously when the accelerator pedal opening
Rear Track 1320 degree is increased. When the accelerator pedal opening
Height of degree is gradually descend, the vehicle speed is decreasing.
490
mass When the vehicle speed is lower than 5km/m, the energy
Tire recovery was closed and the vehicle entered the creeping
145/60 R13
parameters
stage. The vehicle control system basically realizes the
control of vehicle acceleration, deceleration, braking energy
This paper selects ISO/3888-1-1999 (Passenger Cars— recovery, creeping, etc through the above test analysis and
Test track for a lane-change manoeuvre—Double-lane completes the verification of the vehicle function
change)[12] as the standard for A0-level prototype Double-
lane change test. The experience is carried out on a dry
asphalt pavement by arranging the stakes as shown in Fig. 11.
The entrance width A1 and exit width A2 of double-lane
road is related to prototype width b

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 2019 22nd International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS)

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(C) The Curve of Motor Output Torque

Fig. 13 The Result of Double-lane experience

VI. CONCLUSION
First of all, this paper modularizes vehicle control strategy
into different functional modules and implements Power
On/Off SWC, Driver Determination SWC and so on by
Simulink. Secondly, according to the AUTOSAR standard,
the Runtime Environment is designed to ensure data
interaction between different functional modules and
software layers. Finally, an A00-class pure electric vehicle is
used to verify the vehicle control system. According to the
double-lane road test results, the vehicle control system
designed in this paper can meets the normal driving of the
A00-class prototype.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was mainly supported by National Key R&D
Program of China, under project 2018YFB0104805(Research
and application of key technologies for high efficiency and
lightweight In-Wheel electric motor assembly).

REFERENCES
[1] SunSheng. The development and status of AUTOSAR standard [J]
Mechatronics ,2014(12):33－38

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