Toward Automated Virtual Electronic Control Unit (ECU) Twins for Shift-Left Automotive Software Testing

Abstract: Automotive software increasingly outpaces hardware availability, forcing late integration and expensive hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) bottlenecks. The InnoRegioChallenge project investigated whether a virtual test and integration environment can reproduce electronic control unit (ECU) behavior early enough to run real software binaries before physical hardware exists. We report a prototype that generates instruction-accurate processor models in SystemC/TLM~2.0 using an agentic, feedback-driven workflow coupled to a reference simulator via the GNU Debugger (GDB). The results indicate that the most critical technical risk -- CPU behavioral fidelity -- can be reduced through automated differential testing and iterative model correction. We summarize the architecture, the agentic modeling loop, and project outcomes, and we extrapolate plausible technical details consistent with the reported qualitative findings. While cloud-scale deployment and full toolchain integration remain future work, the prototype demonstrates a viable shift-left path for virtual ECU twins, enabling reproducible tests, non-intrusive tracing, and fault-injection campaigns aligned with safety standards.