CANcept: Model-based CAN Traffic Generation and Manipulation

Testing timing-related safety properties of Controller Area Network (CAN)-based software requires precise control over transmitted data and communication timing. Existing open-source tools typically encode such scenarios in low-level scripts, making them difficult to maintain and evolve. We present CANcept, an open-source model-based tool for specifying, generating, replaying, and manipulating CAN traffic. A traffic schedule model (TSM) defines message timing and content transformations, and a DBC-based communication model (DCM) defines encoding and decoding between message-level traffic and CAN frames. CANcept combines both models in one execution mechanism for generated and manipulated traffic, including replay of transformed traces. A preliminary evaluation indicates that CANcept realizes the specified scenarios, with low timing deviation and stable execution under elevated traffic rates.