¹Department of Electric, Electronic and Control Engineering, UNED, Juan del Rosal, 12, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
²Department of Electrical and Control Engineering Universidad de León, Campus de Vegazana s/n, Escuela de Ingenierías., 24071 León, Spain.

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Abstract—New and innovative techniques to validate software are needed to reduce cost and increase software quality. This research focuses on the validation of engine electronic control unit software by using expert systems (EXs) and dynamic link libraries (dlls) with the aim of checking if this technique performs better than traditional ones. To do this, a test-case database was built and run by using hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations to validate a series of software modules (SMs) by using these techniques: the tester-in-the-loop, automation by using a Python script, the model-based testing and EXs combined with dlls with the aim of assessing several factors such as: productivity gain, bug detection skills, functional coverage assessment, ease to automate test-cases among others. Dlls and EXs improve the HIL success rate by 4.8%, 6% and 20% at least, for simple, fairly-complex, and highly-complex SMs, respectively. Between 9 and 13 more bugs were found when using the EXs and dlls compared with other techniques. Two of the bugs would have required software not initially planned as they were linked to environmental policies. The proposed technique can be applied to any types of a SM, especially in those cases in which traditional validation techniques fail.

Index Terms—Software validation, hardware-in-the-loop simulations enhance, expert system, dynamic-link library, performance and code bugs.

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Cite: Pedro Miguel Ortega-Cabezas, Antonio Colmenar-Santos, David Borge-Diez, Jorge Juan Blanes-Peiró, "Application of Rule-Based Expert Systems and Dynamic-Link Libraries to Enhance Hardware-in-The-Loop Simulation Results," Journal of Software vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 265-292, 2019.