Automatized testing HIL system for agile product-design environment

The stricter safety requirements in the rail industry – implied by the EN 50128 standard – contribute to an increasing demand for testing rail vehicles and their subsystems, especially vehicle main controllers. Hardware-in-the-Loop method, which is commonly used in automotive and aerospace domains, has proved to be functionally useful. However, such systems would usually exceed the budget of a development project in the railway industry, due to short series manufacturing and multiple vehicle variants. To deal with this problem Tritem Microsystems has designed Virtual-HIL which decreases the overall cost and increases portability of this kind of a system. In this paper, we present both the classic approach and our groundbreaking system, along with a use case from one of our recent projects together with an automated testing framework built on the top of our Virtual HIL.