The Dongfeng EQ6110 hybrid electric city bus. Click to enlarge.

Faced with the challenge of developing a battery management system in 18 months, the six-person Dongfeng Electric Vehicle engineering team determined that it needed to eliminate the debugging and maintenance effort of traditional hand-coding implementations. The team developed the controller model and a model of the battery using test data, both in Simulink.

The engineers performed simulation and used rapid control prototyping to run the control algorithm against a real battery, before generating production code using Real-Time Workshop Embedded Coder for their target ECU, which is based on the Freescale S12 microcontroller. Tools for Model-Based Design helped the team model, verify, and generate all the application code—more than 100,000 lines—while creating a single environment for design, simulation and verification of the battery management system.

Model-Based Design helped the team, which included individuals with backgrounds in varying disciplines of engineering, work more collaboratively to beat the project timeline and meet quality standards such as the MISRA C guidelines. DFEV engineers are reusing the controller design for the company’s HEV sedan, which is currently in development.

With Model-Based Design, we have an integrated process for development, from idea through production code generation. The MathWorks tools helped us develop key battery management technology using our own expertise, in an environment that facilitated early and continuous verification of our design, all without compromising our high focus on quality.

—Dr. Xiaokang Liu, principal engineer at Dongfeng Electric Vehicle

Dongfeng Electric Vehicle Co., Ltd. is engaging in researching, manufacturing and marketing of electric vehicles (EVs). Dongfeng Motor Corporation, the parent of DFEV, commenced the research of EVs at the beginning of the national Eight Five-Year Plan. Since September 2001, DFEV has been founded as a corporation shared by government, industry, university and Institute. Under the scientific and canonical management, DFEV concentrates on developing and commercializing the EV products, including pure electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles.